Local LEO often drops off individuals who require a medical clearance for jail, only to immediately exit the unit.
What are the triggers/metrics that indicate you need to assign a guard to the patient vs leaving them for the ED Staff to deal with on their own?
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That is not supposed to happen. If an individual is in custody, they are still in the care of the police officer until they have been released to the custody of the detention center. That agency should not be doing that.
You don’t just get to arrest somebody and walk away.
If we arrest someone and they need to be taken to the ER, we can get approval to issue a citation instead of making an arrest.
If the crime is serious enough, we are stuck sitting with them until they are released from the ER.
Yeah, we don’t leave people in custody alone like that. I might step out of the room while the doctors/nurses do their thing, but I’ve always got eyes on the person I’m supposed to be watching.
If we take someone to jail, they refuse them because of medical reason until they’re cleared by the hospital, then we transport them to the hospital and stay there until they get discharged…especially if it’s over some bullshit that shouldn’t take long to get cleared (which is usually the case with our jail.)
If it’s something serious and the prisoner is going to get admitted or something then it depends on what the charges are.
If it’s some sort of low level non-violent crime we usually will leave an officer there while another one get a warrant for their arrest. Once we have a warrant, the duty officer sends a letter over to the hospital notifying them that the person has a warrant and that they are supposed to call us before the person is discharged so we can come get them. Our hospitals are pretty good about calling us usually.
If it’s a more serious crime then we may sit on them until they get discharged. The problem with that is it takes an officer (or two depending on the prisoner and the crime) off the road for hours or days. We will usually make it an OT detail when that happens, but that becomes extremely expensive to have 2 officers sitting on OT for multiple days in a row. We’ve got one of those going right now and by the time the guy discharged I’m going to guess my agency will have spent well over $50k in OT to sit on him.