Description/Abstract
We study the effect of community access to mental health and substance use treatment on police officer safety, which we proxy with on-duty assaults on officers. Police officers often serve as first-responders to people experiencing mental health and substance use crises, which can place police officers at risk. Combining agency-level data on police officer on-duty assaults and county-level data on the number of treatment centers that offer mental health and substance use care, we estimate two-way fixed-effects regressions and find that an additional four centers per county (the average annual increase observed in our data) leads to a 1.3% reduction per police agency in on-duty assaults against police officers. Established benefits of access to treatment for mental health and substance use appear to extend to the work environment of police officers.
Document Type
Working Paper
Date
Fall 9-2023
Keywords
law enforcement, healthcare, on-duty assaults, mental health disorders, substance use disorders
Language
English
Series
Working Papers Series
Disciplines
Economic Policy | Economics | Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration | Public Policy | Substance Abuse and Addiction
ISSN
1525-3066
Recommended Citation
Deza, Monica, "Treatment for Mental Health and Substance Use: Spillovers to Police Safety" (2023). Center for Policy Research. 477.
https://surface.syr.edu/cpr/477
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Included in
Economic Policy Commons, Economics Commons, Public Policy Commons, Substance Abuse and Addiction Commons
