In Atlantic City, NJ, pandemic changed police response to mental health needs

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic not only threatened individuals’ physical health but also seriously strained mental health and access to care. A new study analyzed police data from one U.S. city before and after the start of the pandemic to examine whether the frequency of mental health calls for service and police-initiated stops for mental health reasons changed. Police involvement in responding to mental health situations changed slightly after COVID-19 began, with the greatest impact related to dispatched calls in early 2020.

The study, by researchers at Stockton University, is published in Criminal Justice Policy Review.

            “Researchers have amassed evidence of the negative impact of COVID-19 on mental health, with anxiety and depression the most common disorders, and increases in alcohol and recreational drug use,” according to Christine Tartaro, distinguished professor of criminal justice at Stockton University, who led the study. “But while we know that the pandemic changed daily social, work, and leisure routines for many, researchers are still seeking to understand how these adjustments affected components of the criminal justice system.”

Tartaro is an expert whose work is promoted by the NCJA Crime and Justice Research Alliance, which is funded by the National Criminal Justice Association.

            In the early years of COVID-19, the negative effects of the pandemic on mental health were not distributed equally across the population. People from socially disadvantaged backgrounds and with pre-existing mental health challenges and those who lacked access to services reported the most severe problems. In addition, individuals changed how they sought help and organizations limited their face-to-face contact with consumers.

            In this study, researchers sought to determine whether the frequency of police involvement in mental health care changed over the first years of the pandemic. They analyzed more than 2,400 police calls—calls for service and officer-initiated stops that involved mental health—in Atlantic City, NJ, from January 2019 to December 2022. This span represents the period before and after New Jersey’s governor announced stay-at-home orders in mid-March 2020. The study estimated the effect of the pandemic on police involvement in mental health calls using interrupted time-series analysis.

The study found a temporary reduction in dispatched police officers during the first few months of the pandemic, but no long-term trend through 2022. In addition, there was a slight decrease in police-initiated contact for mental health calls after the initiation of COVID-19 restrictions. The study suggests that the pandemic affected how police were involved in providing mental health care, with the greatest impact related to dispatched calls for mental health services in the initial weeks after the COVID-19 outbreak.

The authors suggest that it is unlikely the reduction in dispatched calls early in the pandemic reflected a decline in the need for mental health services. Instead, it was probably the result of a combination of stay-at-home orders that reduced interpersonal contact and a reluctance to call for help during the early days of COVID-19 to avoid hospitals. Reductions in tourism (i.e., fewer people in the city) also likely had an effect.

            Among the study’s limitations, the authors note that because their analysis included only calls labeled exclusively as mental health calls, it likely included just a fraction of total calls the police department received for mental health concerns. In addition, because Atlantic City is a unique location, with a heavy reliance on tourism and a disproportionate amount of homelessness, the findings from this study may not generalize to other jurisdictions.

            “Although research suggests that police limited their proactive enforcement in the early days of the pandemic, our study found that police-initiated contact with people with mental illness in Atlantic City did not change substantially from January 2019 through 2022,” notes Ruibin Lu, associate professor of criminal justice at Stockton University, who coauthored the study. “Future studies might assess why this occurred.”

The research was supported by the Bureau of Justice Assistance and the Justice and Mental Health Collaboration Program: Embedding Clinicians in Law Enforcement Agencies.