70 3 Police and Law Enforcement—Civil Forensics
the superego, and managing the id. For example, in improving the patient's contact
with reality, the officer may wish to use a direct or indirect method of clarifying
reality. This may mean describing and defining exactly what is taking place to the
mentally ill person during a confrontation.
An experiment conducted by Finn and Stalans (1997) showed that police officers
tend to have certain preconceived notions regarding male versus female victims and
assailants. Mentally ill assailants in particular were shown to be viewed in a some-
what different light than their nonmentally ill counterparts. The study examined
the influence of assailant or victim role, gender, and mental status on police officers"
attitudes regarding both assailants' and victims' naivete, passiveness, dangerousness,
future criminality, psychological sickness, responsibility, credibility, blameworthi-
ness, and control over actions. It was hypothesized by the researchers that if mental
state was a large contributing factor in officers' inferences, then both male and
female assailants who display signs of mental illness would be less capable of un-
derstanding the wrongfulness of violence, should be less passive, more dangerous,
more likely to engage in future crime, more psychologically sick, less responsible,
less credible, less blameworthy, and less in control of their actions than assailants
who are not mentally ill.
The researchers found (based on reactions to fictional vignettes) that stereotypes
of the mentally ill appeared to shape officers' beliefs and inferences regarding as-
sailants when signs of mental illness were recognized. More specifically, mentally ill
assailants were believed to be more dangerous and less in control regardless of their
gender. Further, findings suggested that when no mental illness was evident in the
vignettes, gender stereotyping did take place (Finn & Stalans, 1997).
Forensic Psychology and Policy Implications
(liven the current state of police attitude, inference, and beliefs regarding the men-
tally ill, what can be clone to improve the knowledge base surrounding this issue?
Clearly, literature and programs designed to improve police officers' understand-
ing of the handling and treatment of the mentally ill are lacking (Patch & Arrigo,
1999). What information does exist tends to be limited in scope. However, certain
programs have been implemented, with varying degrees of success, in an attempt
to help bridge the gap between the mentally ill and law enforcement procedures
and policies.
Mentally ill persons very often find themselves in jail for committing an act
which has broken the law in some way. Often, the mentally ill are incarcerated in
a jail setting not because they are criminals, per se, but because there are no other
available resources to utilize at the time of the offense (V. B. Brown, Ridge ly. Fetter,
Levine, & Ryglewicz, 1989).
Abram and Teplin (1991) found that the vast majority of 728 severely ill jail
inmates met criteria for alcohol disorders, drug disorders, or antisocial personality