I’d love to read the equality impact assessments for Right Care, Right Person – if there is one. I know some forces don’t have one, others do and it must be fascinating to contemplate it. The programme, as I’ve covered many times on here, is predicated on the idea of taking an area of social importance and saying the police role in that issue will be boundaried by a fairly hard, pretty blunt interpretation of the law as to what is or is not a legal responsibility for the police. I’ve spent some time trying to think about whether the police take a similar approach to other social issues – I can’t think of anything.
Over recent months I’ve seen various examples of the police doing plenty of things for which it is fairly obvious, they have no specific responsibility or legal obligation. This has ranged from seeing a “neighbourhood” police officer and a PCSO helping shovel some sand and aggregate at a community building; assisting an elderly lady to carry her shopping and giving a talk to kids in schools about crime. Now on the last one, it easily argued that this could fit under the “prevention of crime” duty but if that were true, why aren’t all schools benefitting from this, if it’s such important work. We all know there are circumstances in which it’s perfectly lovely to see officers just assisting people who need assistance and if that means carrying home a couple of bags of heavy shopping because someone is struggling, I’m certainly not here to say they shouldn’t assist.
The problem I start to have with all this is the inevitable realisation that those of us who live affected by our mental health are less worthy of non-obligated assistance than children or the elderly, for example. In recent times, a Chief Constable made it clear officers would be deployed in support of councils removing unlawfully erected flags on lamposts in case they faced violence whilst they do so. But we know Approved Mental Health Professionals and mental health nurses are being declined similar support when attending patients who may offer violence, including with weapons.
ROUTINE MENTAL HEALTH CALLS
Now, pointing this out is NOT an argument to say the police should be doing “routine mental health calls”. As you may imagine, I’m now regularly receiving social media comment and emails to suggest the position I have an RCRP is unreasonable because, as one former officer put it –
“I think the aversion to the RCRP is wrong. The police are right to push back on dealing with MH incidents, because they should not be a police matter. The fact that other services are failing to deal with demand that falls in their sphere is not the police’s fault.
I understand and fully support your passion for supporting those with MH concerns and how policing should do better when it does encounter them, but fundamentally, the police are not the service that should be dealing with routine MH incidents.”
I’ve been doing a lot of CPD for Approved Mental Health Professionals recently and here’s what I’ve said in my opening remarks on most of those inputs –
“RCRP is attempting to address a very legitimate problem, one which has existed for decades and which most political and health leaders agree needs sorting – and it’s never been sorted. It seems to me, one reason behind why senior police officers have been writing to give a date after which things will change regardless, is because the decade of promises since the Crisis Care Concordat has produced little and the problem has been exacerbated.
Even more police resources are “picking up the pieces” from politics and healthcare and my having been the duty inspector who has been screamed at for choosing to police a shooting, a separate armed robbery and a rape (all reported within 15-minutes of each other) by ordering two officers to leave a sleeping mental health patient in A&E and walk out to help with these serious incidents, I can assure everyone the tensions are lived minute-to-minute by those in the police having make decisions about how to use finite resources.”
FOR THE AVOIDANCE OF DOUBT –
I’m not saying the police SHOULD be dealing with “routine mental health incidents”, as accused – and I have never said that. I don’t believe they should be doing this and I’ve always argued against it. Those kinds of frustrations are the kinds of thing which got me interested in this topic to start with and this website is testimony to how many hours I’ve spent saying so, writing about it and encourage other officers to better balance their various obligations and navigate the hazards of this complicated business which all too often goes awry due to ignorance and over-reliance on the police.
I was pushing back on this stuff in my own professional practice and declining things which don’t sit with the police in the first decade of this century when I was a young sergeant, encouraging others to do likewise and all long before the Crisis Care Concordat and RCRP was ever a thing. I wrote that sort of approach in to policies, guidelines and training and incidentally, it has been really interesting how many senior police officers objected when I did it, only for them to embrace these ideas later on.
What I am saying – because this is what we’re seeing – is welfare check requests involving something extra and which does amount to a statutory duty, can’t just be declined by call handlers and officers saying “we don’t do mental health” or “RCRP, sorry”. We know this is happening – we have the inquest and Preventing Future Death reports to prove it. If RCRP actually worked in the real world as it would wish to do, I wouldn’t have too much to say, just something about the impossibility of working out from a phone call whether the so-called ‘threshold’ for police deployment is satisfied.
DISCRIMINATION
So something unpalatable I’m left with is the observation that this stuff all just reveals a discriminatory impact of policing on its society: we don’t ring-fence police action for anything else I can think of by saying officers will only become involved where there is a strict legal duty to do so. Every single day your police service does non-statutory, non-obligatory things to oil the wheels of the area they serve. If they didn’t, they’d end up looking a little foolish and no doubt their legitimacy as an agency would be questioned.
Is the reality not just that far too many officers (including senior officers) pretend the role of policing is far narrower than it actually is because policing has never just been about legal duty?
“Policing is what happens when something’s happening which ought not to be happening about which somebody ought to do something now.” – Egon Bittner.
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, 2026
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 