"What do you think you're doing, pig?
Do you really give a fig, pig?
And what's your favourite sort of gig, pig?
Barry Manilow?
Or the Black & White Minstrel Show?"
Yay, Kitten!
I've dealt with the police in a variety of contexts, usually psychiatry-related. Carrying out a Mental Health Act assessment at someone's home, for example, often involves the police (sometimes even the dramatically-monickered 'Enforcer' with his Freudian battering-ram, to break the door down). More often than not, they're exceptionally helpful (more so the older and/or female officers), just the right degree of unobtrusive, and I'm glad to have them around. In that situation, they're generally very respectful of us doctors. I'm clearly getting older, though, because they seem almost comically neonatal.
Then there are the situations where they bring someone who's been behaving "oddly" to a psychiatric hospital for assessment, under a separate section of the Mental Health Act. Typically, they want to dump the individual and head off elsewhere, but strictly speaking, they're obliged to wait with them until the assessment's over - so there's often some resentment there, especially if we decide not to offer/force admission.
Probably the least pleasant psychiatry/police dynamic takes place when we ('we' being myself and a social worker) are asked to assess someone they're holding in the police cells. Not only is the setting not particularly conducive to psychiatric interview, but often the police - particularly if they're young, male and excitable - have already made their minds up about the individual concerned, and will vigorously argue diagnosis with one afterwards. Commonly, we'll arrive at the station, having perused the relevant psychiatric casenotes (typically, the individual has an antisocial personality disorder, and feigns severe psychotic illness in order to avoid legal consequences for their actions) and (eventually) be ushered in by a gushy young PC, who'll enthuse about how "maaad" this one is. On one memorable occasion, they'd even 'helpfully' arranged for ambulance-men to be sitting ready to transport the individual to hospital. Of course, the sociopath himself's supposed hallucinations, etc. are fairly transparent, and we then have to explain to disappointed/incredulous/stroppy officers that, just because something looks vaguely like a duck and sounds vaguely like a duck, doesn't mean it is a duck. Given that they're ready to believe that people will lie in almost any other situation, the police often seem particularly slow to grasp the concept of feigning mental disorder to escape responsibility. Also similar is the situation whereby someone known to psychiatrists (but responsible for their actions) repeatedly assaults staff, who eventually decide to press charges - and the police drag their feet. There seems to be a widespread feeling that, if someone's got a diagnosis (whatever that diagnosis), then assaults on psychiatric staff are less serious than assaults on anyone else.
Aaand, of course, there's the opposite situation, where they've decided in advance that this or that individual is a 'villain' (they really do talk in terms of 'villains', 'bad'uns' and 'nasty pieces of work') and we're the wishy-washy liberals come to get them off the hook. The fact that the person concerned is genuinely, acutely unwell with a copper-bottomed diagnosis of schizophrenia and/or learning disability seems largely secondary.
So... the cusp of legal/mental health service is often charged with dynamic more rooted in cliche and stereotype than anything else. I've lost count, for example, of the number of times it's been automatically assumed that a black colleague is actually the patient...
I did see another side of things once, when I had a motorcycle cop as a psychotherapy patient. He'd see me once a week, often straight off his shift, and not infrequently, still in his leathers (needless to say, it was often difficult to maintain the requisite degree of inscrutable 'reflection'...). Rather sad chap, who felt constrained by a marriage and children he'd been manoevred into quite young, and with fantasies of just riding past the house and into the sunset. I've since heard it said that those who become motorbike policemen are often 'misfits' in one way or another, and generally distrusted by their colleagues.
In terms of more personal encounters with our Boys in Blue, there's the time they failed to come round and visit us after twats in the same Edinburgh stairwell vandalised our door; or the time they stopped me at 4am on a deserted Central Scotland motorway (I was on-call) to tell me I wasn't going near-enough to the speed limit; or the time a friend's bag was stolen, (amazingly) recovered along with the thief, and they tried to persuade her to say she'd been carrying £200, in order to "make the little bastard pay" (she refused).
I guess it's this latter element which makes me wary: the fact that individual officers (probably necessarily) have a certain leeway in how they can interpret and/or enforce the law, and on occasion this is heavily shaped by their own sense of justice/fairness - and, having seen the somewhat hit-and-miss way they approach the mentally-ill, I often don't have a vast amount of confidence in their ability to Do The Right Thing.
Bleh. That was a bit of a ramble... |
