A large majority of the calls for service that I have responded to with the Gast

A large majority of the calls for service that I have responded to with the Gastonia Police
Department as a rookie police officer have directly or indirectly been affected by mental health issues as a
factor. As a result, discussions with my training officer and my own findings have been developed over
the course of my internship and I would like to write my final paper on the topic of mental health in
relation to our clients that we work with as a patrol officer.
I intend to focus my research specifically on the frontline “patrol” policing aspect, since mental
health has always been a factor of the environment that policing handles but within the recent few
decades has become recognized as a real problem that we face. Dependent on what I find in my research
of the topic, I plan to analyze the statistics surrounding the effects of mental illness to the calls that we
respond to and how departments aim to try to solve the problem in non-traditional approaches such as the
crisis intervention teams at my agency