I’m paying additional attention to Australia at the moment, I have been for a number of months – in fact, a number of years.
Last year, New South Wales Police commissioned a review in to a number of mental health police contact deaths (MH-PCDs) which I covered in a previous blog. We know they sent senior NSW officers to London to look at the “Right Care, Right Person” programme the Metropolitan Police were rolling out and the report mentioned above recommended they should do so. In very recent Australian media, we see coverage of debate in South Australia Police about the role of the officers as first responders in mental health matters. It doesn’t reference RCRP but it’s clearly based on the kinds of debates New South Wales Police have been having about what role the police should play in social responses to mental health incidents. The social justice charity National Justice Project in Australia is running a campaign to remove the police from first responses, calling instead for alternative responses.
We keep hearing how the police can unnecessarily escalate matters. This is true – no doubt at all. Sometimes, the mere presence of a uniform or the mention the police are being just considered can be alarming. We can name cases where this has proved literally fatal, both in the UK and Australia. But whilst this argument is being put in South Australia and New South Wales, nine major professional organisations in the UK are publishing a document about legislation reform which makes the very opposite point – the mere presence of a uniform can be reassuring or at least something which keeps a difficult situation from escalating unnecessarily and those of us with significant operational experience in the police will have seen both, and not just in mental health related contexts.
PEOPLE ARE PEOPLE
Oddly enough, some people love the police, others hate them – some people are distressed by their involvement in things, but not always in a way which proves problematic and other people welcome police involvement precisely because officers are not the mental health system with which so many patients have had difficult and traumatic experiences.
This is what I’ve previously termed Shrödinger’s Policeman – you might escalate things, you might not but whilst accepting some situations make it more obvious than others, you won’t know either way until it’s too late to do anything about it. My view about how to resolve that difficulty is at the end of this post and it frames my view on all this stuff.
But you’ll notice this is all true of those of us living with mental health problems and those of us who aren’t – it would be genuinely weird if the spread of human attitudes differed so much between the two groups.
VESTED INTERESTS
Have you noticed something about the conduct of these arguments about the effect of the police? –
- The UK’s nine national bodies are currently making the point about legislative reform that unpredictable things can happen in mental health incidents and the police sometimes keep a lid on that, hence in various situations the police need to remain involved by the UK not changing its laws in current attempts to reform them.
- The Australian report and its police forces are making the argument that police can unwittingly escalate matters hence in various situations the police need to remain uninvolved wherever possible.
So can we talk about vested interests? – we really do need to talk about vested interests!
If the police withdraw from some mental health situations – which is the foundational idea of the Right Care, Right Person programme which has now influenced Australian police thinking (and in New Zealand, incidentally) – then we will undoubtedly have to think about how to properly resource those issues from which they have withdrawn and the agencies left to deal with them.
COMMUNITY CARE
I’m minded to remember an observation made by Jeremy Laurence in his award-winning book on mental health “Madness” from 2003. Having spent an entire monograph talking about the mental health system at the end of the twentieth century, he covered the closing of asylums and the Community Care Act 1990. After tragedies like the killing of Jonathon Zito in 1994, there were constant calls – still heard today – that care in the community does not work.
Laurence made the point we don’t know whether it works or not because we’ve simply never tried seriously to do it properly – it’s never been funded or staffed sufficiently to stand a chance and here we all are in the 2nd quarter of the twenty-first century still making the same observations after similarly horrific killings like the Nottingham attacks.
We need more nurses, more vehicles and new care pathways – we need many other things besides and to think more deeply about how partnerships work (because the police can’t withdraw from everything). If those alternative response ideas are to fly high, it will have to involve a clear definition and process for determining where the police still should play a role.
WHERE IS THE LINE?
Policing is used to making judgements about whether thresholds are met and my favourite one is an area of policing in which I have significant experience: when is the threshold met for an armed response to a British 999 call? So if you don’t mind a small diversion –
The legal threshold to deploy armed police officers instead of unarmed is surprisingly low – the firearms commander making the decision must have “reasonable grounds to suppose” an armed response is required because of someone armed with a firearm or potentially lethal weapon, but it must be tempered by one further consideration, whether the deployment of armed officers is proportionate to the likelihood and seriousness of the risk.
And that’s how we should be thinking about proportionality for police deployments to mental health incidents. Some things are so serious that we need to take the risk of deploying officers because they alone have the skills, training and legal authority to deal with those kinds of situations. Elsewhere, we must acknowledge the police are relied upon purely because they are an available body of people and they’re asked to do things almost anyone else could do so it’s probably not worth taking the risk and proportionality considerations might need to prevail. And just like the armed-v-unarmed decision: you might have to make these judgements in non-ideal circumstances where you know you don’t know everything that’s relevant to getting the nuance right.
UNCOMFORTABLE CONCLUSIONS
What should we think about all this vested interests stuff? – I’m afraid I can’t currently avoid thinking two entirely unpalatable things –
- Organisations are openly involved in a competition to protect resources or avoid losing them – the police aren’t even attempting to cover that up, but openly stating resources are the key motivating factor in how they are proceeding with RCRP.
- The arguments being put forward are – coincidentally enough – exactly those arguments which assist with winning the competition, almost always offered without acknowledgement of the opposite position.
It should be perfectly obvious to every experienced police officer: many officers are perfectly capable of handling complex, sensitive mental health incidents well without unnecessarily or accidentally escalating anything. It should be as obvious to mental health professionals the police can end up unnecessarily escalating things by their mere presence
So if you want to understand how to get this stuff right, improve your understanding about legal proportionality and decision-making when we know there’s more we cannot know before having to make a choice.
Awarded the President’s Medal, by 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, 2025
I am not a police officer.
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
Mental Health Cop 