April 15, 2010

Improving Responses to People with Mental Illnesses Tailoring Law Enforcement Initiatives to Individual Jurisdictions

The Council of State Governments Justice Center and the Police Executive Research Forum prepared a report for the Bureau of Justice Assistance containing a seven step program designed to help policymakers create specialized policing and law enforcement responses to people with mental illnesses. This seven step program included understanding the problem, articulating program goals and objectives, identifying data-collection procedures needed to revise and evaluate the program, detailing jurisdictional characteristics and their influence on program responses, establishing response protocols, determining training requirements, and preparing for program evaluation.