What Happens When People with Dementia Commit Crimes?

August 22, 2023

(Scientific American) – Not everyone with dementia steals or runs red lights, of course, but it appears that people with this diagnosis are more susceptible to criminal behavior. It’s difficult to determine just how often the police are called to intervene in dementia-driven behavior, but one way to look at it is through fbi data. More than 100,000 people older than 65 were arrested in 2019, a number that represents about 0.18 percent of all people older than 65 in the U.S. For comparison, 8.5 percent of the patients seen at the University of California, San Francisco, Memory and Aging Center between 1999 and 2012 committed crimes after receiving their diagnosis. (Read More)