Police forces in England will no longer respond to mental health incidents unless there is a risk to life or crime being committed, the government has said.
The move could save up to one million hours of police officer time per year, freeing up their time to focus on fighting crime and protecting communities, the Home Office said in a statement on Wednesday.
Some forces in England and Wales currently attend 80 percent of what a senior officer termed health and social care incidents.
But under the new National Partnership Agreement between the police and the NHS, this will be cut to between 20 and 30 percent within the next two years.
The Right Response
The Metropolitan Police, Britain’s largest force, has already said officers will stop responding to mental health callouts from September unless there is a threat to life.In Humberside, a pilot called “Right Care, Right Person” has seen an average of around 1,400 hours per month of police time saved.
Policing minister Chris Philp said: “The police have been responding to a very large volume of mental health cases, which isn’t, of course, the best thing for the person concerned because what they need is medical assistance, not a police officer turning up.
“What the National Partnership Agreement does is set out a framework and an expectation that across the country, police forces will work together with the local NHS, to make sure that people suffering mental health crises get a health response and not a police response.”
Rachel Bacon, the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for policing and mental health, said that a police response to mental health issues often have a negative impact.
“Individuals told us that the attendance of police officers when they are experiencing health or social care issues has a negative impact and they feel criminalised,” she said.
“It is often the case that attending officers are unable to provide the services which are needed to resolve the situation effectively.
“There is broad consensus that the police’s primary purpose is to maintain peace and to prevent and detect crime. That is what the public rightly expects us to do.”
But Dr. Lade Smith, president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, warned that the new plan “should not be taken as a green light for a unilateral discontinuation of police presence in mental health emergencies.”
Pressure on Police
In February, Home Secretary Suella Braverman wrote to police forces and said that she wanted to “see more police officers on the beat, investigating and preventing crime.”“Mental health demand pressures on many forces are taking officer time away from fighting crime,” she said.
“People in mental health crisis need to be seen by healthcare professionals to get the appropriate assessment or treatment in the right environment,” she added.
A 2018 report from Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services found that police officers say that they are increasingly being used as the service of default in responding to people with mental health problems.
The report found that the scale of the problem is illustrated by findings that, in London, for example, the police receive a call about a mental health concern once every four minutes and send an officer to respond to a mental health call every 12 minutes.
It added that the top five individual repeat callers to the Metropolitan Police Service all have mental health problems and called the force a combined total of 8,655 times last year, costing the service £70,000 just to answer the calls.
Research has suggested that mental health work is not perceived to be a valid part of the police role and that officers receive very little mental health training.
