An Arm of the Carceral State: Mental Health Social Worker Complicity in Police Violence

Mass protests against racist police violence in the past decades have led to growing calls for anti-carceral alternatives, including replacing police officers with social workers for mental health crises. But this proposal deserves closer scrutiny considering how mental health social workers have long collaborated with the police. I explore the specificities of these collaborations, along with the discursive underpinnings. These practices are situated in their institutional contexts and the broader intermeshing contexts of racism, settler-colonialism, and disablism.

Mental health social workers-initiated police intervention is an integral part of daily social work practice. Institutional ethnographic interviews with mental health social workers and an examination of social work texts reveal three major elements informing mental health social worker-initiated police intervention. First, interviewees consistently cited fear of professional disciplinary measures and other professional obligations as fueling calls for police intervention as a standard response to certain scenarios. The professional ethos of social work, born out of efforts to achieve greater legitimacy and remunerations, and in particular the subjectification of social workers as agents of the carceral state enshrined with the power to intervene upon the lives of oppressed people, also underpins these social work practices. Second, the notion of risk is often brought up as rationale for mental health social worker-initiated police intervention, alluding to mental health social workers serving as specialized forecasters of future harm. This rationalization is tied to the mental health field’s eugenicist origins that conceptualized mad and racialized people as dangerous threats to be contained through repressive measures like forced sterilization, anti-miscegenation, immigration restrictions, and confinement. Finally, mental health social worker-initiated police intervention exists in the context of the settler-colonial capitalist order. The crisis situations described by interviewees as precipitating police intervention are rooted in structural factors, but social workers engage in the task of erasing or obfuscating these underlying processes as a part of their work as disciplinarians. This work illustrates how mental health social workers are a part of the institutional archipelago, the constellation of institutions and practices that operate through carceral logics in the service of maintaining Canadian settler-colonial capitalism.