Police face calls on mental health issues every two minutes
POLICE are having to handle a call on mental health-related issues every two minutes as they “pick up the pieces” from a broken NHS system, the police watchdog claims today.
In its first inquiry into the issue, HM Inspectorate of Constabulary said police were being distracted from investigating crime because they were having to deal with tens of thousands of cases from a mental health service in crisis. Some people with mental health problems had been deliberately shunted on to police by NHS staff who wanted to clock off for the day or weekend, the report alleged.
The inspectorate warned that this was tying up stretched police resources at a time when they faced increased demands to tackle knife crime, child exploitation and a raised terror threat.
HM Inspector Zoe Billingham, who led the investigation, said: “We are seeing forces attending fewer other crimes because they are focusing on mental health-related incidents.
“We cannot expect police to pick up the pieces of a broken mental health system. Over-stretched and all too often overwhelmed police officers can’t always respond appropriately, and people in mental health crisis don’t always get the help they need.
“It is a national crisis which should not be allowed to continue. Other services need to stop relying on the 24/7 availability of the police. The police should be the last resort, not the first port of call.”
According to the inspectorate’s analysis, 22 police forces took 318,000 calls relating to mental health issues in two years, which equates to one every two minutes if scaled up to all forces. This figure excluded the Metropolitan Police, which dealt with a mental health-related matter every four minutes and had to send an officer to deal with such a call every 12 minutes.
The top five individual repeat callers in London all had mental health problems and called Scotland Yard a combined 8,655 times last year. It cost £70,000 just to answer the calls, said the watchdog. Although up to 7 per cent of incidents in some forces
were flagged as mental health-related, the inspectors accepted that it could take between 20 per cent to 40 per cent of a force’s officers’ time because they would have to spend hours caring for or supervising the individual before an NHS bed or care was found.
In more than half of cases, people detained under the Mental Health Act had to be taken to a place of safety in a police car when they should have been in an ambulance, said the inspectorate.
Ms Billingham said: “They need to be cared for in a healthcare setting. They should not be locked up in police cells or – even worse – held in the back of a police car for their own safety.”
The peak time for calls to police for support with mental health-related incidents appeared to be between 3pm and 6pm on weekdays, times that coincided with NHS staff starting to clock off for the day, the inspectorate said.
Two thirds of these calls involved a “concern for the safety” of the individual, compared with a tenth in those recorded as non-mental health incidents. “One in 10 of those concerns of safety calls are coming into police from other state agencies – from mental health teams, GPS or social care teams,” said Ms Billingham.
“This suggests that those agencies are transferring their risk to the police as they clock off for the day and shunt that demand on to the police out of office hours. This cannot be acceptable.
“The police are being relied on by other partners to pick up the pieces when they have gone off duty.”
A survey of 17,000 people found just 2 per cent felt it was the responsibility of the police to respond to mental health-related calls; 70 per cent felt it the responsibility of the health services and 10 per cent felt it was the responsibility of local councils.
A government spokesman said: “The best place for people suffering a mental health crisis is in a healthcare setting, which is why we are investing £2billion in mental health services.”