Many years ago when I was working at a police headquarters on mental health policy, a friend of mine who was a detective sergeant in the Public Protection Unit had been doing some work on a sample of the force’s domestic homicide reviews from the previous couple of years. He spotted two stats he thought would be of interest to me and dropped me an email:
- 8 of 15 victims were in receipt of care from a mental health trust at the time of their death or had recently disengaged from it in the months previously.
- 7 of 15 perpetrators were also known to secondary care mental health services at the time they killed their partner or had disengaged from care in the months previously.
- 5 of the cases involved a double overlap where both the victim and the perpetrator were known.
Fast-forward fifteen years or so and this sort of thing is analysed much more regularly, in more depth and formally published as part of the Home Office’s work on domestic abuse and we recently saw a new publication about domestic homicide reviews.
It does provides quite grim reading, I’m afraid, for those of us interested in policing, mental health and criminal justice – and for those interested in domestic abuse or deaths after police contact, such as domestic abuse victims who died by homicide or suicide. And if you don’t have time to read the whole document, use the search function to look for the words “mental” or “mental health” and it will take you easily to the headlines, graphs and other statistics as well as the substantive parts of chapters 4 (page 23) and 5 (page 33), where mental health is mentioned a lot and analysed more than I’m going to cover here.
HEADLINES
Victims –
- Vulnerabilities had been identified for
- 96% (of 49) victims who died by suicide,
- 65% (of 80) intimate partner victims, and
- 52% (of 29) familial victims.
- Mental health was the most common vulnerability (34% of 228 overall), followed by problem alcohol use (24%).
- Mental health issues were identified for
- 96% (of 49) victims who died by suicide,
- 54% (of 80) intimate partner victims, and
- 31% (of 29) familial victims.
- Of the mental health issues depression was the most frequent.
Perpetrators
- Familial perpetrators were more likely to experience vulnerabilities (93% of 28) than intimate partner perpetrators (70% of 70).
- The three most common vulnerabilities were –
- Mental ill-health (37% of 151),
- Illicit drug use (28%), and
- Problem alcohol use (26%).
- The most common mental health issues were depression (19% of 184), and low mood or anxiety and suicidal thoughts (16% for each).
- The police were aware of 42% (of 86) perpetrators as abusers. Fourteen per cent
were known to children’s social services and 14% also to health services. - Mental health services managed, supervised or were attended by 65% (of 23) familial perpetrators and 37% (of 35) intimate partner perpetrators.
In relation to Court verdicts,
- For familial perpetrators manslaughter was 45% of 33 verdicts and diminished responsibility 33% and a secure hospital order court verdict.
There is so much more within this report than these headlines. If you read chapters 4 and 5, you’ll find these headlines statistics explained much more fully, including more about the mental health of both victims and perpetrators.
It’s this sort of thing I think Lord Adebowale had in mind when he made his remark about mental health being “the core business of the police”. He didn’t mean the police running around doing crisis care work whenever they are asked to do so or sucked in to a vacuum, he meant that day to day police work, like responses to domestic abuse, mean officers will be dealing with vulnerable victims and vulnerable perpetrators.
These data related to homicide reviews, but you can be your last pound the data is relevant to things seen when officers are responding to non-fatal domestic abuse incidents where both parties may be presenting with vulnerabilities and we need to be careful not to see the argument deployed that “mental health is not police work” that was saw on Inside the Force last week where officers spent time telling the camera operators how much of their work was mental health and how it wasn’t appropriate they were dealing with it, but the first example in the programme of this non-police work was a domestic abuse assault by a vulnerable perpetrator with background mental health problems.
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 am not a police officer.
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