September 2, 2025
A note from reporter Dana Brozost-Kelleher:
On August 29, the Invisible Institute and MindSite News published an investigation that found Chicago Police officers are increasingly turning to forced hospitalizations when responding to mental health-related incidents–a controversial option that involves detaining people against their wishes at a hospital emergency room for a psychiatric evaluation.
You can read the story in a special issue of South Side Weekly, which includes a package of stories by student journalists from Medill Investigative Lab-Chicago, examining the city’s mental health and crisis response systems. You can also find the story on MindSite News’ website.
Reporters from Invisible Institute and MindSite News have been investigating this story for more than two years. We analyzed data from the Chicago Police Department on its handling of mental health-related incidents and found that between 2023 and 2024, the first years for which comprehensive data is available, the number of police-initiated hospitalizations increased from 1,764 to 2,319 — an increase of more than 30%. During these years, more than 20% of mental health calls responded to by Chicago Police resulted in an officer deciding to forcibly hospitalize someone.
In total, police have involuntarily hospitalized people for psychiatric reasons at least 6,700 times since 2021, according to our analysis.
Our reporting explores not only how often police were deciding to forcibly hospitalize Chicagoans — more than six a day in 2024 — but also the impact this practice has on people in distress who are detained by police officers with minimal mental health training, and who are provided with little information about the alternatives to arrest and hospitalization that exist in the city. We found these encounters are often violent and traumatizing and can lead to negative long-term outcomes for those forcibly hospitalized.
Despite longstanding concerns about the ways that Chicago Police respond to people experiencing mental health crises, the department didn't collect data on officer-initiated involuntary hospitalizations until recently. There is also no state body that tracks this information, making it difficult to track the prevalence and outcomes of these cases.
This story is particularly timely now. Both the Trump administration and some Democratic governors — though not Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker — are seeking to expand the use of involuntary hospitalization as a way to respond to perceived increases in crime and visibly unhoused individuals. Law enforcement are often the tip of the spear of that approach. But, like Illinois, few states track much information about law enforcement's use of their power to involuntarily hospitalize an individual based on their own judgment, experience, and training — whatever that might be.
Dana Brozost-Kelleher
investigative reporter
Invisible Institute reporters Sam Stecklow, Dana Brozost-Kelleher, and Isabelle Senechal produced this story along with Medill externs Jenna Mayzouni, Allende Miglietta, and Stephana Ocneanu. We collaborated on this investigation with Josh McGhee from MindSite News.