Police Response to Mental Health Calls for Service

Kayla G. Jachimowski is assistant professor of criminology, law, and society at Saint Vincent College. Jonathon A. Cooper is associate professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

Divided into two parts, this book looks at how crisis intervention training (CIT) affects police officers’ responses to mental health calls for service. Part 1 provides a historical overview of mental health in the US, explaining how psychiatric deinstitutionalization and, concomitantly, the criminalization of people with mental illness became a policing problem.... Part 2 focuses on how, in their research, the authors found that CIT did not significantly affect how duly sworn law enforcement officers and police academy cadets hypothetically responded to mental health calls for service. Undeterred by their findings, the authors conclude that CIT can nonetheless have an idiosyncratic impact on individual officers, and they encourage future research in this direction. Recommended.

• IntroductionPart 1: Policing and Mental Health Calls for ServiceChapter 1: An Introduction to the ProblemChapter 2: Understanding Mental Health: A Brief History American PracticeChapter 3: Mental Health’s Implications for Policing Part 2: State of Policing and Mental Health Calls for ServiceChapter 4: Police Training - General Patterns Related to CITChapter 5: Police Training - A More Detailed LookChapter 6: Moving Forward: Theory and PracticeAppendix A: How We Gathered our DataAppendix B: Survey InstrumentsAppendix C: Vignette UniverseReferencesAbout the AuthorsIndex