Mental health training lacks

Frontline officers attend an average of 98 mental health-related events, including suicide threats or attempts, every 24 hours.

And the brother of a man murdered by a psychiatric patient says the eight hours of training police recruits get in dealing with mental-health callouts is not nearly enough.

In 2007 mental-health victim advocate Graeme Moyle’s brother Colin Moyle was bludgeoned with a spade in suburban Auckland before being set alight by former flatmate Matthew Ahlquist.

Ahlquist was later found not guilty of murder on the grounds of insanity.

Police are dealing with an avalanche of mental-health callouts but recruits only get eight hours dedicated training on how to cope with the influx of sometimes volatile and dangerous people in crisis.

Moyle said officers were under-trained to be dealing with people who were often ‘‘just flipping out’’ and not committing any crime and the problem had become a huge drain on police resources. They should not be first responders.

Meanwhile, Ministry of Health mental health crisis assessment teams worked business hours leaving police to pick up the slack, he said.

National prevention manager Superintendent Eric Tibbott said the rise in the numbers of people threatening suicide and self-harm was a global phenomenon explained by a raft of competing theories. Since February the daily number of callouts in New Zealand had risen from 94 to 98.

‘‘It’s a very complicated social issue with no easy answer,’’ Tibbott said.

In February Stuff revealed that while suicide callouts had increased about 9 per cent a year, a new police report showed 111 calls for the next tier of mental distress jumped 77 per cent between 2009 and 2016.

The Police College has recently been criticised for being too soft on recruits while earlier this month the Government confirmed funding had been axed for a ground-breaking $8 million coresponse service that would have seen a mental-health worker attend all crisis calls along with police and ambulance staff.

Recruits get a total of eight hours dedicated mental-health training during their 16 weeks at the Police College.