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Chester County
Emergency Response BY MICHAEL IVERS
I
n just two short years, the United States of America has confronted, sometimes reluctantly, some ugly truths about itself: A nation divided by polarizing politics, incendiary rhetoric that culminated in an assault on our democracy on January 6th, the fallout from which is only now just beginning to be understood. It is important to recognize that this attack on the Capitol pitted Americans against Americans, not wholly unlike skirmishes that preceded the Civil War, including protestors violently assaulting uniformed police officers. In the days and weeks following the insurrection, three police officers, from the US Capitol Police and the DC Metropolitan Police Department, killed themselves. One of the ugly truths about America and its law enforcement systems is that this nation’s emergency mental health and crisis is unnecessarily stigmatizing and it criminalizes individuals in crisis, some of whom may be living with a serious and persistent mental illness, some of them simply unable to cope with a life struggle or stress. This is not opinion; it is fact, and it is easily proven without any citation, footnote, or statistic. Who responds to psychiatric emergency/emotionally disturbed person calls in America? It’s the police.
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Why? Is being mentally ill in America a crime? If you peek outside of your blinds during a psychiatric emergency playing out across the street, you will certainly understand that, yes, it is as you watch three or four police cars roll up to the neighbor’s house, and you see Sarah or John being led out of their house with their hands cuffed behind their back and placed in the back seat of a radio car. Why? Did they commit a crime? In many instances, no, they didn’t, but this is how America has decided that it’s appropriate to respond to people who need emergency psychiatric treatment. Nationwide, it is estimated that roughly 20% of all radio calls coming in to police dispatch centers are mental health or substance related. Research revealed that 84% of police agencies surveyed said mental health call volume is only rising, and 63% responded that on-scene call time has increased. Police resources are strapped and, shockingly, not all officers are trained in how to appropriately respond to a psychiatric emergency and de-escalate the situation at hand. Some even argue that just the presence of a police officer on-scene, with their firearm and handcuffs and power to take away liberty and life is, de-facto, an escalation, regardless of whatever crisis intervention training they have had.
