3 - (SYM 11) Police Opinions Regarding Escalation and De-escalation Tactics and How to Improve Police Officer Behavior When Interacting with a Black Man Experiencing a Mental Health Crisis

Background: Police violence in the United States disproportionately impacts Black men (DeVylder et al., 2022) and persons with serious mental illness (Fuller et al., 2015; Rohrer, 2021). Using hypothetical vignettes, this study aims to explore police officers’ perspectives on violent interactions.

Methods: Utilizing the Qualtrics online survey platform, 107 police officers read a fictional vignette, in which the police character escalates his behavior, resulting in the death of a Black man with schizophrenia who is experiencing a mental health crisis. After reading the vignette, participants responded to two prompts, Question One: participants were asked how competently they felt Officer Wyatt handled the scenario and to respond in 2-3 written sentences about specific aspects that led them to that, and, Question Two: participants were asked how Officer Wyatt could have improved his response. Themes were established by the first author in consultation with the PI. Then, two coders including the first author independently coded 25% of the dataset to establish intercoder reliability (0.648 and 0.684). Next, the first author analyzed the remainder of the responses.

Results: For Question One, themes included: Defense of Officer actions (29%); Criticism of Use of Lethal Force (24%); Criticism of Not Using Soft Skills (17%); Acknowledgment that Police Officers Are Not Sufficiently Trained in Mental Illness (16%); and General Criticism (14%). It is notable that the category of greatest frequency included statements that defended the officer’s actions (i.e., Officer Wyatt did what he was trained to do). For Question Two, recommendation themes included: Greater Use of Soft Skills (45%); Less Use of Lethal Force (20%); No Improvement Necessary (14%); More Officer Resources Needed (13%); and Other Suggestions and Criticisms (8%). It is noteworthy that the biggest category (45% of responses) recommended using soft skills over aggressive tactics when interacting with a symptomatic person.

Conclusion: Study results may suggest that officers believe laypeople do not understand their plight and that aggressive tactics may be more necessary than laypeople understand. However, they also appear to believe that further police training to increase officers’ use of soft skills (i.e., de-escalation over aggressive tactics) may help decrease the likelihood that violence will occur when police officers interact with people experiencing SMI.