Highlights
Americans have considerable mental health and substance problems plus an inability to behave well per data. These issues have implications for police-civilian encounters.
About 50% of Americans with a substance use disorder also have a mental illness.
Considering there are approximately 50-60 million police-civilian contacts a year, what could go wrong?
It’s almost impossible to make the right decisions during every interaction. Is that why we can’t keep or recruit police officers?
This article is available as a podcast on YouTube.
Author
Leonard Adam Sipes, Jr.
Former Senior Specialist for Crime Prevention and Statistics for the Department of Justice’s clearinghouse. Former Director of Information Services, National Crime Prevention Council. Former Adjunct Associate Professor of Criminology and Public Affairs-University of Maryland, University College. Former police officer. Retired federal senior spokesperson.
Former advisor to presidential and gubernatorial campaigns. Former advisor to the “McGruff-Take a Bite Out of Crime” national media campaign. Produced successful state anti-crime media campaigns.
Thirty-five years of directing award-winning (50+) public relations for national and state criminal justice agencies. Interviewed thousands of times by every national news outlet, often with a focus on crime statistics and research. Created the first state and federal podcasting series. Produced a unique and emulated style of government proactive public relations.
Certificate of Advanced Study-The Johns Hopkins University.
Author of ”Success With The Media: Everything You Need To Survive Reporters and Your Organization” available at Amazon and additional booksellers.
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Article
There seem to be a lot of pissed-off cops.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the United States lost over 25,000 local police employees, and the number is higher if you include state agencies. Police agencies throughout the country are complaining that the number of recruits is dropping. As a result, they are lowering standards.
Some cities report they are approximately 1,000 officers below authorized levels. Some cities are reporting over an hour’s wait time for police officers to arrive which has an obvious impact on crime reporting and public safety.
All of this is indicative of problems law enforcement officers face. Is the job of being a police officer so difficult as to persuade potential applicants not to apply and thousands to leave? If so, what’s the impact on citizen safety and the delivery of services?
Part of the problem is the unrelenting negative media coverage of police use of force. But many in law enforcement believe that force (or the threat of force) isn’t because of overly aggressive cops; it’s more an issue of uncooperative suspects or hostile people they interact with.
Repeated surveys from the US Department of Justice indicate that police use “or” threat of force is rare, two percent of 50-60 million yearly police encounters. Citizen surveys are supportive of law enforcement based on trust and fairness regardless of demographics.
So what are the reasons that being a cop has become so hard?
Mental Health
When I was a police officer decades ago, the great majority of the people I interacted with (including those I arrested) were civil and compliant. It was rare to use physical force. But today’s environment seems different.
Data indicates that 42 percent of police shootings involve people in mental health crises. In most of these cases, it involved potential or ongoing acts of violence.
As I progressed through the justice system, I discovered that mental health caseloads tripled in parole and probation, and correctional agencies.
Pew’s analysis found that adults reporting co-occurring serious or moderate mental illness (hereafter “mental illness”) and substance use disorders in the past year were far more likely to be arrested (emphasis added) compared with both those with mental illness alone and those who didn’t experience any mental illness or substance use disorder.
Pew: “Young people are contending with anxiety, jails have become de facto mental health centers, and deaths are rising from drug overdoses…”
“Our nation is facing a new public health threat. Accelerated but not solely caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, feelings of anxiety and depression have grown to levels where virtually no one can ignore what is happening. A CNN/Kaiser Family Foundation poll put a number to it: 90% of Americans feel we are in a mental health crisis.”
“A report in JAMA Health Forum has noted that 38% more people are in mental health care since the onset of the pandemic than before. And an unprecedented White House report from earlier this year begins, “Our nation is facing a mental health crisis among people of all ages, and the COVID-19 pandemic has only made these problems worse.”
“In truth, we are facing three distinct crises, which partially overlap. There is the youth mental health crisis, highlighted in an advisory from the surgeon general. There is a crisis around serious mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, contributing to social problems including homelessness and incarceration. And there is the ongoing substance use disorder (SUD) or addiction crisis, fueled by prescription opiates such as oxycontin but complicated by new, lethal drugs such as fentanyl.”
Pew: “At least four-in-ten U.S. adults (41%) have experienced high levels of psychological distress at some point during the pandemic, according to four Pew Research Center surveys conducted between March 2020 and September 2022.”
Brain Fog
New York Magazine: “Brain Fog Is Here To Stay. For many of us, the fog never quite lifted — and complaints of mental slowness now seem to be pervasive in our group chats and social-media feeds. Last year, a large study of adults in the U.K. found that 28 percent reported brain fog associated with “functional impairments,” and while it’s tempting to chalk that figure up to long COVID, the version of the disease that can last for months or years, the survey didn’t bear this out. Long COVID was just one predictor of brain fog…”
Rudeness
Pew: “Five years after the coronavirus outbreak, many Americans say public behavior in the United States has changed for the worse, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey.”
“Nearly half of U.S. adults (47%) say the way people behave in public these days is ruder than before the COVID-19 pandemic. That includes 20% who say behavior today is a lot ruder. Another 44% of adults say public behavior is about the same, while only 9% say people are behaving a lot or a little more politely in public.”
Substance Abuse
US Department of Justice data from decades ago stated that the majority of people arrested were under the influence of drugs or alcohol at the time of arrest.
When I was the director of public information at the Maryland Department of Public Safety, we estimated that 80 percent of those incarcerated had histories of serious drug use. Our parole and probation caseload also had high numbers of substance abusers.
The current estimate is that 25 million Americans are frequent drug users.
“Substance use disorders are among the most pressing and least addressed medical conditions facing incarcerated people. While half of people in state prison have substance use disorders — far outpacing the national prevalence of 8%.”
US Sentencing Commission: “Most individuals in the study who sold drugs, as well as those who overdosed, were unaware of the exact substances involved in the transaction. 79% of victims who overdosed on fentanyl did not know they were taking it. 92% of victims who overdosed on a fentanyl analogue were similarly unaware. 5% of sentenced individuals knowingly misrepresented the drugs they sold.”
Bureau Of Justice Statistics: “An estimated 81% of persons in prisons and 84% of those in jail reported ever using any drug in their lifetime. About 58% of state prisoners and 63% of sentenced jail inmates met the criteria for drug dependence or abuse for any drug.”
Conclusion-What Cops Face
First, we need to establish that all available data indicates that the great majority of people with mental health or substance abuse issues will not engage in criminal activity. But what I’m hearing from today’s cops is that interactions with the public are far more intense than in previous years possibly based on people using drugs or alcohol or having emotional problems.
There is immense controversy regarding police interactions and the use of force. The simplest of exchanges can explode. According to national polling from the USDOJ, two percent of police-citizen contacts involve the use “or” threat of force.
Per Bureau of Justice Statistics research, more than half of all prison and jail inmates had mental health problems. These estimates represented 56% of state prisoners, 45% of federal prisoners, and 64% of jail inmates, Mental Health And Crime. Being these are self-reports, the actual numbers are higher.
Add substance abuse and histories of violence and data stating that most correctional offenders come from troubled backgrounds (i.e., child abuse and neglect, brain injuries, exposure to violence, sexual abuse as children for female offenders) and we begin to understand the dangers and difficulties of police officers making stops and arrests.
“I know there’s a saying that ‘Hurt people, hurt people,’” Winfield said. “But where I come from, hurt people kill people, CBS News Covering Baltimore. Cops deal with a lot of “hurt people” daily.
Per the Bureau of Justice Statistics, many corrections offenders have severe medical issues that complicate interactions.
It’s also common for weapons and firearms to be present.
So in the final analysis, police officers are interacting with an immense number of people with a wide array of mental health and substance problems. Not covered in this article are the physical and developmental disabilities prevalent in our society. The rate of child abuse and neglect within the offender population is considerable.
It takes an extraordinary police officer with immense skills to wade through these issues and make the right decision every time. When I was a cop, I discovered that it was almost impossible to make the right call every time I interacted with the public. With the loss of police officers and with society piling on additional duties (i.e., school security, red flag laws, event security, mass shooting prevention) being a police officer IS much harder than ever.
Making a mistake now means that you are on the front page of every newspaper in the country.
Do we provide the training necessary to successfully deal with the array of issues listed above? No. Do we provide cops with the less than lethal weapons designed to incapacitate with minimal harm? No.
Is any of this an excuse for bad behavior on the part of police officers? No. But I have seen mild-mannered cops dedicated to equal and constitutional law enforcement lose their tempers when a criminal threatened his family with violence.
Maybe it’s time to make sure that every police officer in America has the skills, training, and equipment necessary to successfully interact with people with troubled backgrounds. Maybe it’s time to attend to the mental health of cops. Maybe it’s time to understand the high suicide rate in law enforcement.
Maybe it’s time to understand the risks cops take. 50-60 officers are feloniously killed each year. Over 79,000 law enforcement officers were assaulted while performing their duties.
Maybe it’s time to stop stereotyping all cops as brutal based on the mistakes of a few.
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