This paper examines the perspective of police officers on conflictual encounters with individuals with mental illness. The study aims to identify the frequency, challenges, reasons for intervention, conflict potential, and factors contributing to escalation and deescalation in operations involving mentally ill individuals. To achieve this, a survey of N = 157 police officers was conducted, incorporating both quantitative and qualitative elements. The results indicate that operations involving mentally disturbed individuals are common and a part of them lead to conflict situations. The primary reasons identified on the part of the individuals involved were a lack of understanding of the situation, aggression, mood instability, delusions, disorder-related factors, and resistance or a lack of manageability. On the part of the police officers, impatience, time constraints, and inappropriate intervention strategies were perceived as contributing factors to these conflictual situations. The factors identified as escalating or de-escalating conflict by the police officers were consistent with those reported by individuals with mental illness in previous studies. The report of using force more frequently in deployments with individuals with mental disorders compared to other deployments was positively correlated with insecurity about how to behave during such deployments, perceiving deployments with individuals with mental disorders as particularly dangerous, and negatively correlated with the feeling of being well-prepared for such deployments, highlighting the high relevance of profound police training. The findings are discussed in the context of training approaches for improving police handling of such situations.
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