When Los Angeles police Det. Jim Hoffman arrived at the L.A. County-USC Medical Center's psychiatric emergency department on a Saturday morning in March, he found a small crowd waiting.
Two police officers from the LAPD's Central Division were sitting in a narrow hallway outside the locked psychiatric unit with a man and woman in handcuffs. Both patients had been brought to the hospital overnight on so-called 5150 holds, a forced 72-hour detention for mental evaluation of those deemed to be a threat to themselves or others.
But the ward was full. The man — and a rotating series of cops with him — had been waiting for 11 hours for a bed to open up.