The Independent Office for Police Conduct publishes a series of bulletins entitled “Learning the Lessons”. They are intended to highlight and summarise various IOPC investigations with a view to ensuring the wider police service thinks about what needs contemplating from those investigations.
Episode 43 of their series is exclusively focussed on mental health in policing and is worth reading.
Various case studies are included, various pieces by the IOPC’s policy officer on mental health, the NPCC / College of Policing leads on mental health. It’s worth bearing in mind when you read this post, most of the case studies involved here pre-date the introduction of the Right Care, Right Person programme and I’ll return to this point at the end of the post.
View the IOPC content critically, however – case study 3 is interesting.
CASE STUDY 3
It involves a situation where police assisted someone to hospital, presumably an Emergency Department, and she was assessed there by a crisis team who decided she should go home and they would follow up with her by phone later that day. Upon ringing, there was no reply to calls or text messages so in the early hours of the morning, they asked the police to conduct a welfare check. A call handler assessed this as a priority and despatched police officers overnight who knocked the door and received no reply. There was no reply to calls by the control room either so they updated the crisis team and closed the log.
The crisis team visited and called the patient the next day, still receiving no response and because they viewed this as highly unusual for her, they again requested a welfare check. A police supervisor, after discussion with a more senior officer, declined to undertake the task stating the police would not take ownership of this and closed the log stating “section 17” (powers of entry to save life or limb) were not appropriate but no rationale for this assessment was recorded. Following further calls by the crisis team and the lady’s father, the police attended and found her deceased. I have to presume they entered under s17 PACE, but this is not made clear.
To the side of the case study are questions for other forces to consider. You can read this whole thing without forming a clear view of whether the IOPC investigators were saying s17 grounds for entry were made at the point where this was denied and declined. Yes, the lessons include documenting rationale but here we have a senior officer stating the non-return of phone calls is not, of itself, enough to justify taking on a welfare check or utilising s17 powers. Are the IOPC agreeing with this, or not?!
We don’t know.
CASE STUDY 6
In other investigation, the police attended a mental health crisis incident in private premises and correctly understood officers cannot rely upon section 136 of the Mental Health Act 1983 whilst in a dwelling. However in that incident, the man involved went to leave the premises and the write-up implies officers wouldn’t have been able to use the power if he had, which isn’t correct. I do hope I’ve read the case study correctly!
Of course, it’s quite correct the police cannot artificially manufacture the presence of someone outside a premises in order to then ‘justify’ the use of s136. But that doesn’t mean they cannot allow someone who wants to leave a house to do so and then use the power, assuming the grounds for doing so are fully justified. Again, I was a little disappointed to see that detail left uncovered in the case study.
And of course finally, the document is so full of information about RCRP that we cannot leave that unmentioned.
Firstly, the IOPC states, “We will shortly publish our external position on RCRP” (p5) so it sounds like there will be a document or press release of some kind later this year. Remember, the case studies involved all pre-date RCRP so I’m especially interested in what the IOPC think about case study 3, summarised above and fully viewable on page 18. It is a request for welfare checks by the NHS – this is precisely what phase 1 of RCRP is aimed at. The published position of the police service, which is outlined in the National Partnership Agreement from June ‘23, is officer swill only be despatched where there is an immediate risk to life or immediate risk of serious harm.
IMMEDIATE RISK
I’ve written before about this ‘immediate risk’ threshold – and not only because it’s still misunderstood.
The Supreme Court case of Rabone is the authority on how to consider immediate risk and it means something more than a death which is thought to be ‘imminent’. In the case study, we have someone allowed by clinical staff to go home after a suicide attempt without being ‘sectioned’, only to fail to answer a phone call. The only information available at the point of the request for a welfare check is that the patient did not answer the phone or texts.
Is this an immediate risk to life now?
The following day, the patient was still not responsive to phone calls, text messages or home visits so a further request was made for a welfare check by the police.
Is this an immediate risk to life now?
I’m told training on this point suggests an immediate risk where someone’s death is “happening now” or “about to”. Nothing in the phone calls requesting checks includes information that death (NB, death, not just injury) is happening now or about to.
Would this be treated as an immediate risk to life?
The specifics of questions like these need to be at the heart of investigations in to case studies like this not least because you can imagine some Coroners will be asking those questions and for what my view on it is worth: yes – such a non-response by a mental health patient after a suicide attempt is an immediate risk to life, not to mention the question of whether this person is missing because their whereabouts is not known and cannot be ascertained – something else which went unmentioned by the IOPC.
An immediate risk to life if there is a risk of death if it is not a “remote or fanciful” risk which is “present and continuing” at the point where the operational duty on the police is being raised.
Winner of the President’s Medal, the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
Winner of the Mind Digital Media Award
All opinions expressed are my own – they do not represent the views of any organisation. (c) Michael Brown, 2024
I try to keep this blog up to date, but inevitably over time, amendments to the law as well as court rulings and other findings from inquests and complaints processes mean it is difficult to ensure all the articles and pages remain current. Please ensure you check all legal issues in particular and take appropriate professional advice where necessary.
Government legislation website – www.legislation.gov.uk
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