Policing a neurodiverse world: Lessons from the social model of disability

Abstract

Programs that aim to improve the police response to mental health crises and related incidents have implicitly relied on a medical/individual model of psychiatric disability, which emphasizes efforts to provide mental health treatments to individuals. This paper argues that this perspective has unnecessarily limited the range of options that police might draw from to manage these incidents. Advocates of an alternative, social model of psychiatric disability (as well as the “neurodiversity paradigm” it inspired) argue that we should view disability not as a property of individuals with certain impairments but as a property of the society that has failed to accommodate them. I argue that repeated calls to the police provide important information about the location and character of those failures, and that police have an important role to play in rectifying them. I illustrate how police have already played that role in several cities.