Police in Britain have a wide remit — they are relationship counsellors, playground attendants, debt advisers, dispute invigilators and speaking clocks, called to resolve anything from a flooded street to a neighbour playing music late at night.
In fact it is sometimes difficult to work out exactly where the business of law and order begins and ends (the sociologist Egon Bittner once defined police work as “something that ought not to be happening and about which someone had better do something now”). But for the last decade, amid shrinking budgets, police and government have been worrying about mission creep. Where does proper policing segue into community babysitting?
This question has become particularly urgent where it concerns mental health services. These have dwindled as the rate of mental illness in the population has risen, and the police have long been picking up the slack. Mark Rowley, the head of the Metropolitan Police, says London coppers now get a call about a mental health concern every four minutes, and a 2018 internal report found that 44 per cent of the Met’s work is mental health-related.
This kind of work is a particular time sink too: officers spend about a million hours a year in hospital waiting rooms sitting with mental health patients. They are called on to check in on people who have missed an appointment, get patients into hospitals, and retrieve patients who wandered out of them.
Everyone dislikes this state of affairs: it is bad for stretched police services, and bad for seriously ill people who do not deserve to end up in the hands of the law. Although many officers are now experienced in dealing with mental health patients, they are not really trained to do so.
Between 2020 and 2021, almost half of those detained under the Mental Health Act were picked up by a police car rather than an ambulance. Patients released too soon from cash-strapped community care often end up living an unsettled existence moving between the police and mental health services — creating more work for everyone in the process.
Despite endless talk about the need to beef up mental health services, for years nothing has changed. But now matters are at a head. Rowley announced this week that from September, officers will only attend emergency calls related to mental health where there is a threat to life.
This announcement has caused a great deal of consternation from mental health services and charities. Without police help, they say, thousands of mental health patients will fall into a vacuum. There are some 1.8 million on waiting lists for mental health support, and among them are people who have been waiting for more than three months — these are the people whose emergencies tend to be answered by the police. The Department of Health and Social Care have promised £150m to improve mental health crisis care, but this won’t cover it.
But sometimes shock tactics are needed. Nothing else has worked. The model for the Met’s plans is a scheme in Humberside, where after a 35 per cent rise in mental health calls every year the police finally managed to hand the bulk of the job back to mental health services. In doing so it won back 1,100 police officer hours a month. It is now judged the best force in the country.
In a fascinating interview with the BBC, Humberside’s chief constable Lee Freeman said he had been forced to make “very similar statements” to those made by Rowley in order to start the conversation locally — setting out firm dates, even if those dates then inevitably slipped. It was only then that enough money was suddenly found to begin to “turn the ship around”, a phased transfer which in the end took 18 months. Ambulance trusts purchased new fleets and beds were found.
Rowley’s three-month deadline is clearly over-ambitious — mental health campaigners are right that he can’t suddenly withdraw services when there is nothing to replace them — but if he is using a similar ploy to Freeman, it might just jolt the machinery into gear.
Only two per cent of the public think mental health calls should be the responsibility of the police, and deploying them to help seriously ill people might do more harm than good. Social care, particularly for mental health, is in an appalling state. A threadbare patchwork of replacement services, mostly provided by the wrong people, has so far covered this up, but reform needs to start somewhere.
