Polizeiarbeit mit psychisch belasteten Personen

The ethnographic research project on how the police deal with persons in a state of mental disturbance addresses an aspect of police work in Switzerland that has hardly been investigated to date. The empirical findings of existing international studies convey an unclear and ambivalent picture of police actions. In particular, we still know little about how such encounters take place on the street and how police officers perceive and evaluate people in a state of mental disturbance in their daily work. The reconstruction of practices and processes of categorizing mental health issues in the organizational context provides new insights into this sensitive and demanding aspect of modern police work.