Galloway, N.J. — A recently published study by two Stockton University professors found that despite strains on access to mental health care during the COVID-19 pandemic, responses by the Atlantic City Police to those types of calls remained largely unchanged.

Distinguished Professor of Criminal Justice Christine Tartaro and Associate Professor of Criminal Justice Ruibin Lu published “The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Police Involvement in Mental Health Calls for Service” in November in Criminal Justice Policy Review.

“Researchers have amassed evidence of the negative impact of COVID-19 on mental health, with anxiety and depression the most common disorders, and increases in alcohol and recreational drug use," Tartaro said. "But while we know that the pandemic changed daily social, work and leisure routines for many, researchers are still seeking to understand how these adjustments affected components of the criminal justice system.”

The study sought to determine whether the frequency of police involvement in mental health care changed over the first years of the pandemic. The professors analyzed more than 2,400 police calls in Atlantic City from January 2019 to December 2022. This span falls within New Jersey’s pandemic-related, stay-at-home orders in mid-March 2020.

While there was a temporary reduction in dispatched police officers on mental health calls during the first few months of 2020, there was no long-term trend through 2022.

“That certainly doesn’t mean there was less of a demand (for service),” Tartaro said. “It just means that people were thinking that if they called they might not get help or they were thinking that it was safer just not to call because nobody wanted to wind up in an emergency room at the start of COVID.”

Tartaro collected the data from the study as part of a collaboration between Stockton, the Atlantic City Police Department and Jewish Family Service of Atlantic & Cape May Counties. The groups are working together thanks to a $740,576 grant from the Department of Justice in 2020 to improve public safety responses and outcomes for individuals with mental illness and/or substance abuse.

“It’s important to see how and when the police are having contact with people with mental illness because, unfortunately, the way our health care system is set up in the United States, people fall through the cracks so often,” Tartaro said. “And it is often left to the police department to be the gateway to the mental health system for people. It should not be this way where we have to wait until somebody is in such bad shape that they encounter the police, that we start to get them mental health help.”

She added that the data for the study is somewhat incomplete because it only includes calls to police dispatch that are only labeled as mental health. If a call is listed as something else, even if it might be mental health related, that would not be included in the data. Mental health only calls make up 1% to 2% of the true amount of calls associated with mental health incidents, which is usually about 10% to 11%, she said.

Tartaro took her data to Lu for her to do a time series analysis over a couple of years to compare before and after the start of the COVID-19 lockdown.

“We want to know what happened during the pandemic, and this study helps us to prepare for a future crisis,” Lu said. “At least we will have some historical record to help us predict what could happen. And it could help the police, the city and other agencies to prepare and allocate resources more wisely.”

-- Story by Mark Melhorn