Working Paper

ABSTRACT

We study the effect of community access to mental health and substance use treatment on police officer safety, which we proxy with on-duty assaults on officers. Police officers often serve as first-responders to people experiencing mental health and substance use crises, which can place police officers at risk. Combining agency-level data on police officer on-duty assaults and county-level data on the number of treatment centers that offer mental health and substance use care, we estimate two-way fixed-effects regressions and find that an additional four centers per county (the average annual increase observed in our data) leads to a 1.3% reduction per police agency in on-duty assaults against police officers. Established benefits of access to treatment for mental health and substance use appear to extend to the work environment of police officers.