You have the right idea, but you're a little off-base. The police cannot hold someone due to concerns of safety of self or others. Only a mental health professional can order that. As a police officer, there times I took someone to the State Mental Hospital on Arsenal and requested an involuntary commitment, but that request wasn't always granted. 

A family member has the same power, subject to being able to get the person to a mental health professional. Ultimately, a doctor has to sign the commitment papers unless the person agrees to sign themselves in.

It's tough to really answer without knowing all the facts, but let me add some hypothetical facts and maybe this will help (and this is based on my experience, not any knowledge of how anything works in California).

In all likelihood, the psychiatrist wanted the patient brought in for an evaluation.  Most psychiatrists aren't going to sign a commitment order without actually performing an in-person evaluation.  So now the issue becomes getting the patient to the doctor.  But what if the patient doesn't want to go?  The family may want him to go and the doctor may want him to come, but if the patient says "no," how do you force him to go?  So they call the police thinking that the police will make him go.  Except the cops have no authority to force this person to go either.  The police can encourage the person to go.  They can have an ambulance respond to the scene to transport.  They can even threaten to take the person involuntarily if the person refuses to go voluntarily.  But in the end, without anything more, the police have no power to force someone to go to their doctor, and forcibly taking the person would be akin to kidnapping.  I can't imagine a cop who would do that.

Drawing on nothing more than personal experience, I can tell you that in 7 years of working in University City (with plenty of crazy people), I don't remember ever encountering someone who had an active commitment order (except in a situation where the patient had escaped from the institution).  There were plenty of times family members wanted someone taken to the hospital.  We encouraged, we threatened and we even lied to the patient (I used to tell them that if they went voluntarily they'd be able to sign themselves out later even though I knew a doctor was likely to do an involuntary commitment which would prevent them from being able to sign themselves out), but we never took someone who in the end flat out refused.

alz wrote:

I bet that cop is absolutely brutalizing himself about whether there was something else he could have done to prevent this

At the risk of sounding like an insensitive prick, I bet he isn't.  Most cops simply aren't wired that way.  

If the cop even remembers the incident, he might blame the system, but he isn't blaming himself.


On a very similar note, however, I don't know if anyone else is watching the docu-series, "The World Wars" on the History Channel, but during the first episode there was mention of a British soldier who, during World War I, supposedly had Hitler unarmed and in his sights and opted to let him retreat from the area rather than kill him.  

Talk about a moment that, if true and if handled differently, could have dramatically changed history.

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/british-soldier-allegedly-spares-the-life-of-an-injured-adolf-hitler