Police in England will stop responding to emergency psychiatric calls on August 31. It writes Guard.

The country’s police chief, Mark Rowley, has ordered his officers not to respond to the thousands of calls they receive each year about incidents related to mental health. Because, according to him, the core task of the police is to eradicate crime. That’s what Roweley wrote in the letter obtained by The Guardian.

This is to relieve the police through a new national scheme called “Right Care, Right People”.

– First, we disappoint patients by sending police officers, not healthcare professionals, to people in mental crisis and expecting them to do their best in circumstances where they are not the right people to treat patients, Rowley wrote.

In the letter, he claims that police spend 10,000 hours a month dealing with mental health issues, and it can take up to 14 hours to turn a patient over to healthcare workers.

Increase the number of tasks

But it’s not just in the UK that there are reports of heavy resource use related to this, in Norway a survey shows Politiforum does it in 2021 a marked increase in the number of psychiatric assignments for some police districts.

The section head for the operations center in the Oslo police district, Runar Skarnes, later said they felt they were helping more medical missions now than ever before.

– The number of assignments in which police assist health with assignments focused on mental health increased nationally from 37,000 to 53,000 in the last five years at last count. This represents a 43 percent increase over the last five years. This confirms our subjective opinion that we are helping more often now than ever before, said Skarnes.

In 2022 also write Aftenposten that the Norwegian police had at least 31,000 assignments related to mentally ill children in the last three years. Children who must be escorted by police when transferred to an emergency psychiatric ward or emergency room after self-harm.

– This is a very difficult task. Many police officers feel helpless. We don’t have the necessary expertise to deal with seriously mentally ill children, said union leader Unn Alma Skatvold at the Police Union.

Several healthcare organizations have implemented pilot schemes with “psychiatric cars”, i.e. psychiatric ambulances, but only Bergen and Stavanger have such an offer in the country.

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