68 3 Police and Law Enforcement—Civil Forensics
effectiveness of these various instruments or personality clusters in the prediction
of job suitability.
More research needs to be conducted on the notion that principle-centered,
person-oriented leadership reduces cynicism among police officers. Program eval-
uations can be carried out in departments that implement these type of leadership
styles and policies reflecting participatory management. Finally, departments that
would implement the "shadowing" concept provided by Toch (1992) should be
evaluated. This assessment would explore if incidents of excessive force or police
brutality would be reduced by more directive evaluations of and preparations for
violence-producing situations and training for violence-prone individuals.
Incarcerating and Executing the Mentally
Introduction
A police officers's job is one riddled with a variety of pitfalls and potential dangers.
As if maintaining control over "normal" populations is not difficult enough, law
enforcement agents often find themselves having to deal with populations that
cannot, or are incapable of, rational and reasonable thought. More specifically,
mentally ill people often find themselves having to deal with law enforcement
after having made some specific threat or engaged in some inappropriate or illegal
action. Consider the following example of how a mentally ill individual may come
face-to-face with the law.
A police officer receives a call and is told that there is an involuntary commitment
request at a large psychiatric institution downtown. The officer calls for an ambulance
to arrive at the scene before he arrives. By the time he has reached the institution, he
is greeted by a melee of interested pedestrians, disarrayed staff members, and a hostile-
looking man holding a butter knife he apparently stole from the kitchen. The man in
question is pacing and mumbling something to himself, apparently severely agitated. It
looks to the police officer like any movement toward the patient may result in a violent
outburst. Due to the fact that the patient is in possession of a potentially dangerous
weapon, the situation must be handled with extreme caution, diligence, and cunning in
order to prevent the patient from hurting himself or anyone else.The manner in which the police officer handles the above situation is critical for
a variety of reasons. For example, would a wrong or inappropriate statement made
by the officer invoke some sort of rage response? Would other patients observing
the ordeal become agitated as well after seeing such an encounter, thus resulting
in other psychotic outbreaks? If the patient refused to submit, how will physical
restraints be applied? Will anyone get hurt in the process? These questions and
others are faced by officers every day. However, a surprising paucity of literature
exists on exactly how an officer should deal with the mentally ill in the line of duty
(Patch & Arrigo, 1999). This section attempts to answer these questions as well as