Law enforcement agencies have become increasingly responsible for managing the occasionally deviant conduct of mentally ill individuals over the past four decades (Teplin, 1983, 1984). That is not just a societal problem but an issue that officers confront as part of their daily work. Drawing from Conversation Analysis’ contributions to the study of neurodivergent behavior (Maynard, 2019), action sequencing, and other aspects of the procedural infrastructure for interaction (Schegloff, 1999), I argue that officers rely on a continuum of accountability in responding to deviant conduct and mental health-related phenomena, and in making sense of participants’ agentic capacities for participating in encounters. Using video data from a large database of police encounters, I explicate officers shifting movement along a continuum of accountability across a range of socio-sequential contexts. At the level of action sequencing, I show how officers encountering conduct that resists comprehension as a form of social action or otherwise departs from commonsense understandings may nevertheless work to incorporate elements of it in advancing a course of action. Further, I examine how these shifting orientations are consequential for officers’ decisions shaping the trajectory of the encounter (e.g., toward arrest, hospitalization, etc.) by showing officers how officers work to arrive at an accountable and reasonable outcome for the encounter’s project(s) (cf. Raymond & Zimmerman, 2016).
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