109 Iowa L. Rev. 2063 (2024)
Abstract
Mental health intervention is a critical tool for preventing police violence. In recent years, activists have pointed to a tragic pattern of police misinterpreting civilian mental health crises and responding with deadly force. People with untreated mental illness are sixteen times more likely to die at the hands of police. Today, a growing number of co-responder programs successfully deploy social workers alongside police to assess, intervene, and de-escalate.
This Article turns the mental health spotlight in a different direction: from the victims of police violence to the police themselves. Police officers experience a range of mental illnesses at rates many times the base rate for the general population. They are among the professions at the highest risk for suicide, substance abuse, sleep deprivation, and PTSD. In police officers, these disorders are each associated, whether directly or indirectly, with an increased risk of perpetrating violence. These statistics point to a law enforcement landscape that abjectly fails to adequately assess officers’ mental health and emotional stability before arming them.
The dangerous state of police wellness is critical to the fight against police violence, whatever one’s theoretical or advocacy stance. For those who would abolish policing entirely, the correlation between police mental illness and police violence offers a new advocacy angle. If officers come to be perpetrators of violence through their inevitable exposure to it, what hope can there be for law enforcement as an institution? For those who favor reform over abolition, the Article uncovers inadequate mental health screening in police departments, formulaic mental health resources, poor recordkeeping, an unrelentingly traumatic work environment, and a machismo culture that mistakes emotional struggle for frailty. Acknowledging psychological vulnerability in police does not justify police violence. But it does demand an open conversation about police wellness, among both criminal justice reformers and law enforcement personnel.