| Abstract: | This article examines the discretionary judgments and reporting practices of police officers, in their apprehension of 528 defendants subsequently remanded for psychiatric assessment in a forensic unit located in Toronto, Canada. Analysis of arrest documents indicated that police routinely invoked labels of mental illness and dangerousness, and that they recommended psychiatric assessment in over a third of cases that eventuated in clinical remands. A significant relationship was yielded between police judgments and clinical assessments concerning the dangerousness of defendants. The police reports of forensic patients demonstrated the tendency of arresting officers to recommend psychiatric assessment as a vehicle for ensuring the dual application of judicial and therapeutic interventions. These police records were replete with moral assessments about mentally disordered defendants and with a number of strategies designed to influence the subsequent decisions of other legal and psychiatric authorities. In this study the police functioned as forensic gatekeepers, alerting clinicians and other officials to signs of mental disorder and criminality and to appropriate courses of action. At the initial point of arrest, the police assisted in laying the groundwork for the subsequent institutional careers of medicolegal subjects. |
