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“The Right Kind of Crazy”: How Patrol Officers Police the Boundaries of Mental Illness through Hybridized Strategies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2022

Natalie A. Pifer
Natalie A. Pifer*
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI, United States Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

How to better police mental illness is an evergreen component of criminal justice reform agendas. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) has, like many departments, adopted specialized strategies designed to improve these encounters by tasking officers with both care and control responsibilities. These hybridized policing strategies are illustrative of a larger trend of managing social marginality through institutions that increasingly destabilize the penal/welfare state binary. This article draws from fieldwork with the LAPD to analyze how patrol officers construct the category of “mental illness” and deploy hybridized strategies. The analysis focuses on the inflection points that shape how a subject is categorized and the call’s disposal to understand how policing from the “murky middle” of state governance unfolds on the ground. Findings show how officers strategically invoke the pressure of time and the power of place to construct this category and deploy specialized resources when resolving trouble case, or “5149 and a half,” calls. Here, hybridized strategies function to manage social marginality through a governance of problem solving that appears uninterested in doing either care or control. The article concludes by reflecting on the project of hybridizing care and control to police mental illness specifically and social marginality more broadly.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 48 , Issue 2 , May 2023 , pp. 437 - 462
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Bar Foundation

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Footnotes

I am grateful to Elliott Currie, Kaaryn Gustafson, Mona Lynch, Keramet Reiter, and George Tita for their guidance on the larger project from which this article draws and my earliest drafts. I am also grateful to the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) for providing me with access for data collection and to the anonymous members of the LAPD who allowed me to observe their everyday life on the job. This article benefited immensely from the excellent insights and suggestions of three anonymous reviewers. Finally, thank you to my colleagues Megan Parry and Christine Zozula for their support during (re)writing. All errors that remain are mine alone, and the content does not represent the official views of the agency studied here. Financial support for this research was provided by the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation, the Office of the Graduate Dean at the University of California, Irvine, and the University of California, Irvine’s Public Impact Fellowship Program. This study was originally approved by the Institutional Review Board at the University of California, Irvine (HS 2015-2235).

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