UCLA

This thesis explores the police role in diverting street-based, severely mentally ill individuals to the hospital for psychiatric assessment. Four illustrative ethnographic accounts drawn from participant observation fieldwork are presented. Analysis focuses on police discretion - the latitude for police coercive intervention – in the form of physical constraint when working with Department of Mental Health (DMH) social workers to place and negotiate hospitalization holds (“flash hospitalizations”) on acutely psychotic psychiatric patients. Police are found to frame physical constraint as a liability and danger to themselves and mentally ill clients. They also refer to the futility of flash hospitalization efforts in the face of chronic mental illness. They employ these anxieties of liability, danger, and futility rhetorically in order to communicate to DMH social workers and family members of the mentally ill the limits of police intervention in flash hospitalization scenarios. Ultimately, these anxieties derive from the way in which the police, as a bureaucratic institution, views mental health care, a field that is not based in police carceral expertise. These anxieties exist in the context of influential, socio-political movements of the 2010s, including Black Lives Matter, which have brought increased public scrutiny to street-based police actions.