By The Editorial Board, The Boston Globe, June 15, 2021
Law enforcement agencies have historically been ill-prepared to respond effectively to emergency incidents involving behavioral health — that is, when a person suffering from a serious mental illness or substance use disorder behaves in a threatening manner, endangering themselves or the public. That’s starting to change, albeit slowly. As calls for police reform have heightened in recent years, police departments across the country have made it a priority to establish and increase funding for teams of social workers to respond safely to such incidents.
Still, for many people, the possible outcomes after those police encounters are typically constrained to two options: Either the person is sent to an emergency department or gets arrested and sent to jail. If it’s the latter, the person now has a criminal record, which often only compounds the mental-health issues that led to the incident in the first place. And the former is generally a short-term medical solution that doesn’t necessarily guarantee adequate long-term treatment. Emergency rooms in the state are often ill-equipped and overburdened by mental health patients, and beds at mental care facilities too few. Far too often, only these scenarios are available, even when clinicians are embedded in police departments.
But there are alternatives at the nexus of policing and mental illness that Massachusetts hasn’t fully pursued. Jurisdictions all over the country have been moving toward community-based models to disentangle law enforcement from crisis response even more, such as jail diversion facilities where patients can receive urgent crisis stabilization services in less restrictive settings than jails or emergency rooms. It’s time for the Commonwealth to get fully on board with these alternatives.
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