இன்டர்நேஷனல் ஜர்னல் ஆஃப் எமர்ஜென்சி மென்டல் ஹெல்த் அண்ட் ஹ்யூமன் ரெஸிலைன்ஸ்

சுருக்கம்

Police Contact with Suicidal Individuals: A Comparison of Self- Inflicted Suicidal Behaviour and Potential Police Provoked Shooting Incidents

Pallavi Pillay and Stuart DM Thomas

Due to the nature of community policing, police frequently find themselves coming into contact with people in psychiatric crisis; among these, calls to people who are suicidal are common. While many of those who attempt suicide do so through self-inflicted means, others have attempted to provoke police into using fatal force; these incidents have been referred to as suicide-by-cop or police provoked shootings. The study used a case linkage design to explore how commonly police report encountering a suicidal person and to consider what differentially characterised a self-inflicted suicide attempt from an attempted police provoked shooting. All incidents involving a person who was described by police as suicidal were extracted from a large random sample of incident fact sheets completed by police over the 2012-2013 fiscal year. Public mental health and prior police contact details of these individuals were also extracted from state-wide registries. Analyses revealed that two hundred and seventy-five (275; 8.9%) of the random sample of incidents involved police responding to suicidal individuals; 222 (80.7%) involved self-inflicted suicide attempts, and 53 (19.3%) were classified as potential police provoked shootings. A number of incident-level characteristics differentiated the self-inflicted suicidal group from the potential provoked shooting group. Multivariate analyses suggested that the likelihood of being a potential provoked shooting incident was 3.49 times higher if the individual was previously ‘known’ to either the public mental health system and/or the justice system. Collectively, these results suggest that police come into contact with suicidal individuals frequently. Self-inflicted and provoked police provoked incidents are characteristically different, both at historical and incident levels, suggesting the need for better information sharing between health and justice services, clinically guided risk assessment of known persons, and the need for more tailored approaches and resolution strategies.