It’s that time of year: new data released for the police use of section 136 of the Mental Health Act 1983, available in a Home Officer bulletin reporting of wider use of various police powers. It gives use various express clues, if you read the thing closely, that there is increasing pressure on the system, […]

I would like to attempt to slay one of the biggest fallacies in all of the debate about how the Mental Health Act should operate, not least because it often happens in connection with operational policing.  And I’m going to fail – because I know that the very proposition I’m about to tackle will lead […]

The next time the Home Office publish statistics on the use of s136 and the locations to which people are removed after use of police powers under the MHA, we should learn that it’s down in to double figures – under 100 for the whole country. Given that it was over 11,000 around 2008, this […]