NAMI North Carolina Facts: Crisis Intervention by Law Enforcement

Fact Sheet

Crisis Intervention by Law Enforcement

In one study, almost 60 percent of police officers said they had answered at least one call involving someone with a suspected mental disturbance during one month and more than 40 percent had responded to more than one such call.

While events leading up to law enforcement encounters with mentally ill people are varied, they usually involve disruptive or abnormal behavior.

Often, police officers have discretion in how they handle these encounters and tend to resolve matters informally whenever appropriate. Often, they refer the mentally ill person to a psychiatric emergency service.

Mentally ill people are more likely to be arrested following a police encounter than people without such disorders, especially when they are using drugs or alcohol.

In a survey of relatives of people with mentally ill relatives, 52 percent said their relative had been arrested before and most said their relative had been arrested more than once.

Crimes for which mentally ill people are often arrested include alcohol or drug offenses, loitering, trespassing or being a public nuisance, driving offenses and assault.

Police referrals account for as many as one-third of all mental health referrals.

Police officers tend to find calls involving encounters with mentally ill people challenging and difficult to manage. They often feel they lack appropriate training, yet they are responsible for handling the situation in a way that serves the needs of the mentally ill person and, at the same time, maintains order and safety.

According to an American Bar Association study, law enforcement officers sometimes arrest people with mental illness when a referral to mental health services would be more appropriate because mental health system resources are inaccessible or unavailable.

A study by Borum, Swanson, Swartz and Hiday showed involuntarily committed mentally ill people who had recently used substance abuse services were about five times more likely to have a police encounter than those who had not. Those who reported using alcohol or drugs were three times more likely to have a police encounter than those who had not. Those who reported recent violent behavior were two and a half times more likely to be picked up or arrested for a crime.

When involuntarily committed mentally ill people did not take prescribed medicine as directed and reported substance abuse as well, their risk of arrest was triple the risk of those who reported either not taking drugs as prescribed or substance abuse alone.

For details, see “Substance Abuse, Violent Behavior, and Police Encounters Among Persons With Severe Mental Disorder” by Randy Borum, Jeffrey Swanson and Marvin Swartz of Duke University Medical Center and Virginia Hiday of North Carolina State University, published in Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, Vol. 13 No. 3, August 1997, 236-250, and “Police Perspectives on Responding to Mentally Ill People in Crisis” by Randy Borum, Martha Williams Deane, Henry J. Steadman of Policy Research Associates, Inc., and Joseph Morrissey of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. NAMI NC thanks co-author Randy Borum for supplying this information.