Welcome to the Nexus of Ethics, Psychology, Morality, Philosophy and Health Care

Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Policing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Policing. Show all posts

Friday, November 12, 2021

Supernatural punishment beliefs as cognitively compelling tools of social control

Fitouchi, L., & Singh, M. 
(2021, July 5).

Abstract

Why do humans develop beliefs in supernatural entities that punish uncooperative behaviors? Leading hypotheses maintain that these beliefs are widespread because they facilitate cooperation, allowing their groups to outcompete others in inter-group competition. Focusing on within-group interactions, we present a model in which people strategically endorse supernatural punishment beliefs to manipulate others into cooperating. Others accept these beliefs, meanwhile, because they are made compelling by various cognitive biases: They appear to provide information about why misfortune occurs; they appeal to intuitions about immanent justice; they contain threatening information; and they allow believers to signal their trustworthiness. Explaining supernatural beliefs requires considering both motivations to invest in their endorsement and the reasons others adopt them.

Conclusions

Unlike previous accounts, our model is agnostic to whether supernatural punishment beliefs cause people to behave cooperatively. Many cultural traits, from shamanism to rain magic to divination, remain stable as long as people see them—potentially wrongly—as useful for achieving their goals. Prosocial supernatural beliefs, we argue, are no different. People endorse them to motivate others to be cooperative. Their interaction partners accept these beliefs, meanwhile, because they are cognitively compelling and socially useful.Supernatural punishment beliefs, like so many cultural products, are shaped by people’s psychological biases and strategic goals

Sunday, October 4, 2020

Rethink Crisis Response—People Who Call 911 Shouldn't Get an Ill-Trained Police Officer, Especially When They're Dealing With a Mental Health Emergency

rethinkcrisisresponseSally Satel
reason.com
October 2020

Here is an excerpt:

Miami-Dade is a large county that was able to follow the tripartite strategy. Shootings by police have declined by 90 percent since CIT training was implemented in 2010, but the program accomplished something more: It shined a light on the high incidence among police of depression and suicide. According to Judge Steven Leifman, who established the Miami-Dade program, officers who go through the training "have been more willing to recognize their own stress [and] reach out to the program's coordinator for mental-health advice and treatment for their own traumas."

Other cities deploy crisis teams that are solely mental health–based; police are not part of the first line at all. One of the nation's longest-running examples of this is CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets). It was created 31 years ago as part of an outreach program of the White Bird Clinic in Eugene, Oregon—once a countercultural medical clinic founded in 1970 as a refuge for hippies on LSD trips and other drug-taking youth. Calls for help are routed to staff 24/7 by the local 911 dispatcher. A medic and a mental health professional respond as a team to incidents such as altercations, overdoses, and welfare checks. They wear jeans and hoodies and arrive in a white van stocked with supplies like socks, soap, water, and gloves. Should a situation spin out of control, they call for CIT-trained police back-up, though last year only 150 out of 24,000 field calls required back-up. People who need further attention are taken to a crisis care facility operated by the mental health department—no trips to jail or to overflowing emergency rooms.

Mental health teams can bring some much-needed relief to municipal budgets. According to TAC, police officers across 355 law enforcement agencies spent slightly over one-fifth of their time responding to people with mental illness or transporting them to jail or psychiatric emergency rooms, at a cost of $918 million in 2017. The CAHOOTS flagship program in Eugene operated on a $2 million budget in 2019 and saved the locale about $14 million in ambulance transport and emergency room care. Within the year, a number of cities (including San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Durham, North Carolina) will be launching programs similar to CAHOOTS.

The best crisis intervention programs help reduce the toll of police involvement gone awry, but the only way to take encounters out of the hands of police in all but the most dangerous instances is to repair the mental health system itself, which is a notoriously tattered network of therapists, psychiatrists, hospitals, residential settings, and support services, and work to prevent ill people from lapsing into crisis in the first place.

The info is here.