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Primary Submission Category: Mental health/function

Involuntary psychiatric commitments following decline in police stop-and-frisk practice in New York City: A natural experiment

Authors:  Parvati Singh,

Presenting Author: Parvati Singh*

Involuntary psychiatric commitments, often initiated through law enforcement or court orders, are significantly more prevalent among Black populations, occurring at five times the rate of other groups. Structural factors, including disproportionately higher surveillance by law enforcement and racial bias in healthcare, may contribute to these disparities. However, whether reductions in police hyper-surveillance (police stops, frisks, searches) can mitigate racial disparities in psychiatric commitments remains unexplored. We leverage a natural experiment to examine the effects of sharp decline in police stops on involuntary psychiatric commitments in New York City. We analyze the impact of the 2012 federal class-action lawsuit against the New York Police Department’s stop-question-frisk policy, a practice disproportionately targeting Black individuals. Following the lawsuit, stop-and-frisk encounters declined rapidly, providing an opportunity to assess potential shifts in involuntary commitment trends through a quasi-experimental approach.

Using data from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project’s State Inpatient Database, we conducted panel interrupted time series analyses to evaluate changes in annual involuntary psychiatric commitments across New York State from 2006 to 2015. The five boroughs of New York City—Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island—were classified as treated regions, while all other counties in the state served as controls. We designated 2012 as the intervention year and adjusted for key covariates, including autocorrelation, demographic factors (age, sex, race), unemployment rate, and fixed effects for county and year. Results indicate a significant decline in involuntary psychiatric commitments in New York City relative to the rest of the state post-2012 (coefficient = -0.55, p < 0.001). However, stratified analyses reveal that this decline does not concentrate among Black individuals but rather affects Black and all other groups similarly. These findings suggest that while reductions in police hyper-surveillance may correspond with overall declines in involuntary commitments in a population, they alone may not be sufficient to address racial disparities.