When does the police role end when executing a s135(1) Mental Health Act warrant? – a question posed to me on email recently from an AMHP. In the area where the query originates, the police “offer” one of two supports to s135(1) warrants –
- Either, they will enter and search for the person and if the AMHP decides to conduct the assessment in the person’s home with consent, the police maintain their role is over and they leave.
- Or, the police will enter, search and remove the person to a Place of Safety for assessment in the other location.
Have you spotted the problems yet?
135 WARRANTS
Notwithstanding that it is only an AMHP who can obtain a warrant from a magistrate’s court, it can only be executed by the police and the main problem, above, is that the 135 process is not finished until the assessment has been done and arrangements made for someone’s treatment or care. That point will not have been reached in either of the scenarios given because the AMHP may well have conducted an assessment in the home or at another Place of Safety, but as we will shortly see, they may not have completed the arrangements and so the police role doesn’t end until the 135 timeline ends, unless otherwise agreed by a joint arrangements between the organisations involved.
It is quite common for AMHPs to be asked to undertake Mental Health Act assessments when it is not certain there is a bed in to which the person can be admitted OR a Place of Safety to which they can be removed, perhaps other than an Emergency Department. AMHPs often have to make unenviable decisions about whether to delay an assessment because it’s clear in some situations, pressing on with it when there is no bed or PoS to be used, is just going to escalate an already-deteriorating situation. I’m sure we appreciate what a nightmare that responsibility is because of what could go awry during a delay in acting.
This all just helps me re-make my point that AMHPs are doing an incredibly difficult, often impossible job and I wouldn’t relish taking the decisions they do. They are not responsible for or able to influence the availability of beds or PoS facilities – that’s a matter for the NHS who have spent the last decade or so devoting less and less of their overall budget to mental health care, at a time of increased demand and worsening social circumstances which affect mental health work for services.
You might ask yourself: what could possibly go wrong?!
AGNOTOLOGY
The Greek word agnosis literally means a state of ‘not knowing’ or ‘ignorance’. It is from this the social science term agnotology is derived. I’m afraid you’re going to hear more about this word and these ideas in the future as it’s one of the main theoretical underpinnings of my PhD – how ignorance is produced, disseminated and re-produced in those factors which emerge from examining police contact deaths. Because I’ve spent my summer reading about this, I thought of it immediately when reading the AMHP’s query. A policy position of the kind described in the two bullet points is producing ignorance in operational decision-making – it fails to take account of things which are known and knowable and it puts operational police decision-makers in jeopardy, without them necessarily realising.
Let me give you an example, again from the 135 world.
Once upon a time, a police force was operating a non-formal policy of “no warrant, no police” – in other words, unless an AMHP had a warrant under s135(1), they would not be able to get police support for a Mental Health Act assessment. The argument went that if the grounds for a warrant were not met, then the police were not needed to manage risk and if there was a risk for the police to manage, the grounds would exist to secure a warrant.
I have known a few all-too-real situations which show this to be false and my favourite example is the parents of a young adult man whose mother recognised he was becoming unwell. She recognised his pattern of deterioration and she called mental health services who, having seen him recently, agreed an MHA assessment is likely to be required. Access to the property is easy because mum will let everyone in and the patient is not a risk to anyone, he simply neglects himself when unwell.
SO WHY THE POLICE?
… because Dad is a nightmare.
He’s previously been threatening, abusive and assaultative to AMHPs at MHA assessments, usually because he becomes very upset at his son being ‘sectioned’. He struggles with stigma and shame and he’s made it clear before he hates the effect psychiatric medication has on his son. Of course, none of that legitimises abusive or criminal behaviour towards AMHPs, DRs or others but the co-ordinating AMHP requests the police.
Under a “no warrant, no police” approach, this request gets declined (and incidentally, under the Right Care, Right Person threshold, it also gets declined) but the reality is there is every reason to think there may be a Breach of the Peace and the commission of a criminal offence and officers may well be necessary to prevent both. Remember: it’s a criminal offence to obstruct an AMHP in the course of their duty – section 129 MHA. But raising RCRP for this situation just exposes again how the so-called ‘threshold’ misses crimes that are likely, but have not yet happened. Given the primary job of the police is to prevent crime and maintain the King’s Peace, that’s quite a gap and again: it drives ignorance in to the system.
Ignorance is a big part of policing & mental health and I used to say so whilst serving. We have policy positions and expensive programmes predicated upon ignorance, reproducing and disseminating it, driving it further down the organisation and helping ensure perverse outcomes and unintended consequences. One way in which this is done after RCRP is the near-total failure of forces to properly re-draft their joint protocols with mental health providers, ambulance trusts and local authority AMHP services. Five topics should be subject of jointly agreed procedures but the very first PFD notice to mention RCRP pointed out that this hadn’t happened in that police force – and in every area where I’ve worked in the last couple of years, it hasn’t happened there, either.
You should ask about this where you work, if you are in a relevant profession.
FIVE AREAS OF BUSINESS
The Code of Practice MHA makes it a requirement that such joint protocols exist across five topics –
- Section 136 MHA and Places of Safety – see para 16.31 MHA CoP (Eng); para 16.38 MHA CoP (Wal),
- Mental Health Act assessments in private premises, inc s135(1) MHA warrants – see para 16.31 MHA CoP (Eng); para 16.38 MHA CoP (Wal),
- AWOL patients, inc s135(2) MHA warrants (and informal patients / ED hospital walkouts) – see para 28.11 MHA CoP (Eng); para 28.11 MHA CoP (Wal),
- Section 140 MHA and urgent admission – see para 14.80 MHA CoP (Eng); para 14.72 MHA CoP (Wal).
- Conveyance – see para 17.10 MHA CoP (Eng); para 17.10 MHA CoP (Wal).
So if you are an officer, AMHP or anyone else operating around the admissions part of the MHA, you should be able to ask your boss or your organisation for sight of these documents and if they don’t have them, I’d strongly recommend you put that omission in writing to them for inclusion on their organisational ‘risk register’. Coroner’s courts have frequently had to castigate organisations for an absence of joint procedures or a failure to keep them up to date or ensure they are known, jointly agreed policies being something that can easily contribute to a death.
So a final word to agnotology: my ongoing work on this has been like hitting the mother-lode. It’s given me a framework for the things I’ve thought for at least a decade. It’s all too easy to see evidence of ignorance in this domain: from the policy positions of the kind we see above, to the joint procedures which are all-too-often inadequate and to the big programmes which seem to leave gaps in their approach, despite the fact that learning is there to be had, if it were wanted – all of this producing, re-producing and disseminating ignorance to the potential cost of us all.
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
