‘Police should not be first call for mental health incidents’
POLICE are calling for a change in the way mental health issues are dealt with after they took up nearly 1,000 hours of officers’ time last year.
Forces in England have said they will no longer respond to calls about mental ill health unless there is risk to life, or of a crime being committed.
In 2022, Guernsey Police attended 457 calls where people were reporting as vulnerable or in a mental health crisis. On average, each incident took up two hours of officers’ time.
‘Although the average is two hours, we can spend up to eight to nine hours with somebody,’ said Deputy Chief Officer Ian Scholes.
‘Because of their condition, they might be violent, and once they get to the emergency department at the hospital, we can’t just leave them there. It’s our job to protect hospital staff as well as the person who is vulnerable.
‘That often means two officers because you can’t just leave one officer with the person if they’re violent.’
Mr Scholes said it would currently be unreasonable for Guernsey Police to adopt the new approach of their counterparts in the UK.
‘If we were just to start now, there’s no alternative and people would be left abandoned.
'That’s not something that we’re prepared to do,’ he said.
‘But by the same token, we can’t sustain using up so much police time, every day, on something that really isn’t a police issue, when it’s stopping us from fulfilling our role and delivering the services that we want to deliver.’
The UK government has said that the new police policy, known as ‘right care, right person’, could save a million hours of police time every year.
And the former chairman of the Jersey Police Authority said recently that the island was spending too much time and an estimated £1m. per year on what he described as ‘mental health incidents’.
Guernsey Police started keeping statistics on its response to mental ill health cases as it started to consume more and more resources a few years ago.
As recently as 2020, there were 292 incidents, but in the first five months of this year, officers have already recorded 221.
Mr Scholes was concerned that leaving the police to deal with such issues was not always appropriate and could even exacerbate problems.
‘If you send a police officer to somebody who is vulnerable, they can feel criminalised by the attendance of police, even though they may have called them.
‘The options left open to police officers are quite limited in that they can detain somebody and then they will take them to the emergency department to get them assessed,' he said.
'If that person is not assessed as being in need of psychiatric treatment, the only other option is for them to be released. And then we start this cycle of them calling again.’
He said Guernsey needed to invest in a specialist facility which would help everyone working in this challenging area.
‘There needs to be some investment, so that there are facilities available for people who need some sort of interaction or engagement.
‘What is [also] needed is signposting to services that will help people who are vulnerable. It might be that they are lonely or their life isn’t going as they hoped.
‘It needs to be recognised that it’s not a policing issue constantly to respond to people who are vulnerable due to their mental health.’
