Imagine this: you’re worried about your adult son who normally rings three times a day and after a day without a call, you can’t raise him by phone or at home. He has a history of mental health problems, suicide attempts and you’re currently aware he’s not the best he’s been. After exhausting all options available to you, there is little choice left but to ring the police on 101 and ask them to urgently check on his welfare because your knowledge of him and his background causes you to genuinely believe his life may be at risk or that he’s caused himself serious harm – and you tell them that.
Bearing in mind the police’s own threshold for involvement in mental health related demand is relatively low, in accordance with the legal test for an “immediate risk to life”, you’re hopeful they’ll get ’round there and, if necessary, force entry because your concerns are real and increasingly terrifying. Even if that ‘article 2’ threshold really is not met, there is also an obligation to respond to so-called ‘article 3’ obligations where there is an “immediate risk of serious harm” or inhumane / degrading treatment.
All of this is the story of how Hobie Harrison was found in his own home, after his family made two 999 calls to Norfolk Police, fearful his life was at risk. As a result of the first call, the police advised his family to call a locksmith. Yes, seriously – they really did advise that. It invites the obvious question about what legal authority a locksmith has to enter a property at the say-so of someone who is not the owner-occupant and this is just one of a few problems with this truly terrible advice.
We should remember: when the Supreme Court ruled in 2010 about whether an immediate risk to life existed in a mental health incident, they found that a distinct possibility of someone’s death happening, which may stop short of being a probability, was still enough to trigger the so-called operational duty to ensure a response. As long as the risk of death was not “remote or fanciful”, the duty was owed. In the particular case before the court, a mental health patient had been formally assessed over many days in a psychiatric unit as being somewhere between at a 5% and 20% risk of death if they left the hospital where they were receiving treatment. The court found that 5% was enough to trigger the human rights obligations which is an unlikely outcome but enough of a concern so as not to be written off as “remote or fanciful”. It still amounted to a “real and immediate risk” which obligated the response.
HOBIE’S FLAT
So was the RCRP “threshold” met or not? – well, there is yet to be an inquest where the full facts are to be set out in terms of what information the 999 calls contained, what questions were asked by the police and what background or other checks they made in order to fully understand the risk in its context. But setting aside the very obvious problems with having a threshold to start with, the first point would surely be made that it was either met both times or it wasn’t.
Why decline to attend the first time, but agree to attend the second time? Of course, we all understand risk can change over time – but what was known the next day that wasn’t known the previous day, beyond the passage of some time?
Hobie’s family made a formal complaint against the police for their refusal to attend on the first occasion and the response was truly astonishing: it turns out the police believed they shouldn’t have attended on the second occasion either! Worse still, having had that thought, they decided it would be egregiously insensitive to say so to Hobie’s parents. Even if you really did think it, someone’s child having died you would probably realise it was something that wasn’t appropriate to say – utterly disgraceful conduct towards a bereaved family.
INQUEST PENDING
Hobie’s death now becomes the 17th case I’m monitoring as it moves towards an inquest. We also have the inquest starting next week for John Garrett in Preston and others in the near future. Norfolk Police will also be preparing for the inquests into the four deaths in Costessey which occurred in early 2024, after control room and other staff had been trained on and were using RCRP protocols, albeit the force tried to argue the scheme was still not formally introduced. They argued they paused introduction of it so they could check it was appropriate, before quietly ‘starting’ in May 2024.
They seem to have offered a ‘defence’ in Hobie’s case as if to say they were only following the “national Right Care, Right Person” – emphasising it is a ‘national’ scheme. It’s smacks a little of “we were only following orders”, but we should remember: the outcomes we appear to have seen in the Hobie Harrison and John Garrett cases, as well as many others in the 31 completed inquests that I know of so far, are exactly the outcomes the RCRP programme was designed going to deliver – whether that’s what was intended to deliver, we’ll have to think more about but complex adaptive systems deliver what they are, in fact, designed for.
If you take a programme, predicated on logical problems, categorical falsehoods and legal inaccuracies then run it before rolling it out nationally after choosing not to evaluate in any way which could be considered credible and way before the NHS was either willing or able to cope with the fallout of it, you shouldn’t really be surprised if the over-simplifications and problems are compounded over time to deliver outcomes which seem to show the errors in the way “immediate risk to life” was trained out.
PILLARS OF SALT AND SAND
We see confusion reigning where Norfolk say there is “no defined response” to welfare concerns and the appropriate pathway depended on the circumstances. RCRP states the police don’t do welfare checks unless there is an A2 or A3 obligation so in that sense the response is defined – it only occurs after a supposed threshold his met for deployment. That said, we know from Coroners the police don’t apply those criteria consistently and often apply it over-ridigly.
Even the IOPC have stated in Hobie’s case, they are “concerned Norfolk Police may not fully understand the risks of the policy.” Not fully understanding things is one of the hallmarks of RCRP and its structure and roll out produces, disseminates and reinforces ignorance. On the one hand that is fair comment, but it should be noted the IOPC, which is the guardian of national death after police custody or contact statistics, openly welcomed RCRP when it was introduced, despite knowing it had never been evaluated and that deaths had occur (I wrote to them) and that their statistic gathering processes fails to ensure RCRP contact deaths are always included.
If only someone pointed this out earlier, eh?!
This post is written with the knowledge of Hobie’s father, Mark to whom I’m extremely grateful for sharing the chronology of events with me from his family’s point of view and giving permission to use some of that to be reflected in this post.
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
