Guest blog from Michael Brown – Mental Health Cop
Professor Jill Peay from the London School of Economics wrote in Mental Health and Crime (2010) that work at the interface of mental health and criminal justice is amongst the most difficult that either set of agencies will ever undertake. Certainly the challenges facing criminal justice agencies are considerable and I have for many years worked on this within the police service. My perspective as a police officer is that ours is potentially the least researched and understood part of how the whole criminal justice system operates when seeking to provide a nuanced response to complex individuals suffering from mental ill health.
There are various reasons for this:
- policing is a round the clock operation and enabling mental health services to engage at the point of demand is inherently difficult and potentially expensive
- policing is historically not as linked to research institutions and universities as other professions within criminal justice – there is more research on prisons, probation and even on the courts system compared to policing
- to understand how investigations into alleged offending by service users are handled is to require a complex understanding of loose concepts like ‘diversion’ and ‘public interest’ as well as difficult legal frameworks around prosecution and Part 3 of the Mental Health Act that are rarely used.
Estimates have previously suggested that police officers identify as few as 15% of those people arrested and taken to custody for alleged offences as potentially having a mental health problem. Yet in a local information sharing initiative we know that a major mental health trust in the south of England has 50% of all those arrested on their NHS list as a current or recent service user. So I’m not sure we even understand the extent of the issue…
There is also lack of clarity as to what ‘diversion’ means, a term which I will admit to disliking for reasons I have explained on my blog. We need to reach a better understanding of what ‘good’ looks like in ‘diversion’ outcomes, as research I undertook in my force suggests that the only variable of relevance to a ‘diversion’ decision is whether an offender on the day they are arrested is ‘sectionable’ under the Mental Health Act. Even where someone does require admission, the potential for Part 3 of the Mental Health Act to provide an effective assessment/treatment/public protection balance in more serious cases is often not considered; and offenders not in need of admission could or should still be considered for non-criminalising diversion.
It is crucial we understand the nature and the variety of demands which affect our police services and the ways in which they are managed now. For this, we need peer-reviewed, mixed methods research of some substance. Only then will we be able to understand how to improve our system and we need to do this together, sharing information and professional expertise.
Michael Brown is a police inspector in West Midlands Police and the author of the ‘MentalHealthCop’ blog.
