metropolitan police officers will not attend emergency calls involving mental health incidents from September.
According to The Guardian newspaper, Force Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley wrote to Health and Social Care to stop the police from coming after August 31 unless there is a threat to life.
The move is intended to free up officers to spend more time on their core duties rather than dealing with patients who need expert medical attention.
The Met Police said in a statement to The Guardian: “If there is an immediate threat to life, officers will continue to respond.
“In the interests of patients and the public, we urgently need to correct the imbalance of responsibility where police officers remains to perform health care duties.
“Health services must take the lead in caring for the mentally ill, allowing staff to focus on their core duties of preventing and detecting crime, keeping the community safe and supporting victims.”
A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police told the BBC that police spend an average of 10 hours with a patient when they come under the Mental Health Act.
They said: “V London only 500-600 times a month staff wait that long to hand over to patients and this cannot continue.
“Police officers are compassionate and highly trained, but they are not trained to provide mental health care.”
In 2020, Humberside Police introduced a similar policy, known as Right Help, Right Person (RCRP), which saw mental health professionals deal with calls.
An inspection by HM Police, Fire and Rescue Services in November found the switch saved the force, which is staffed by mental health charity staff. Mind in the control room – 1,100 police hours per month and said the public received “more timely assistance from the most appropriate assistance provider”.
A Met spokesman said the program had been “hugely successful … reducing demand on all services and, most importantly, getting the right care to the right person”.
The RCRP program is intended to be rolled out nationally, but the commissioner is understood to have run out of patience and believes the “status quo is untenable.”
In his letter, seen by The Guardian, he writes: “I have asked my team that the Met introduce RCRP this summer and abandon health-related calls by 31 August at the latest.
“It is important to stress the urgency of implementing the RCRP in London. Every day we allow the status quo to continue, we are collectively losing patients and failing to set up officers for success.”
He continued: “We are letting Londoners down twice. We fail them in the first place by sending police officers, not health workers, to those in mental health crisis and expecting them to do their best in circumstances where they are not fit to work with patients.
“We are failing Londoners for a second time by taking large amounts of officers’ time away from preventing and solving crime and treating victims properly to fill the gaps for others.
“The extent to which we are collectively failing Londoners and making inadequate demands on the police is very serious.”
According to him, on April 28-29, the police received a record number of calls – 999, but only 30% of them were “related to crime”.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/met-police-officers-stop-attending-mental-healh-incidents-mark-rowley-london-b1084315.html