Almost a year ago, I ventured into a legal argument about admissions under the Mental Health Act in circumstances where finding a bed is proving difficult. In particular, I was interested in those situations where the want of a bed means that police officers are being implicitly requested to do things which could be illegal, […]

I was recently asked on Twitter about the law around people possessing items like blades or scissors, purely for use in self-harm and whether or not they can be arrested / prosecuted? It was quite hard to explain in 140 characters so to avoid creating confusion or the wrong impression, I offerred to do this […]

The last few months saw various debates about Taser and I wrote a post about it just before Christmas. Today we saw events outside Buckingham Palace in which a man who has been reported to have “mental health issues” was tasered by a police officer as he brandished two knives, holding one of them to […]