Police cannot be the safety net for mental ill health incidents, says Fed Chair

THE police cannot be the service of last resort when it comes to dealing with people’s mental ill health, South Yorkshire Police Federation has said.

The number of mental health incidents dealt with by the service has risen by more than a quarter in four years.

Steve Kent, Federation Chair, said: “The Government needs to invest in mental health services, as we know, but also there needs to be an understanding across the board that the police cannot be the service of last resort. Services rely on the police’s in-built duty of care and use it as a safety net for their own inadequacies.

“Whilst I completely sympathise with social services and the NHS, if they can’t attend or deal with an incident of mental health crisis they put it to us because they know ultimately that we can’t say, ‘no’. Obviously the police are never going to say, ‘no’, but there needs to be a push back in the leadership.

“The emergency services and social services need to realise that we can’t be their safety net. They have to take responsibility for this more, and we should only ever really be there when there’s violence involved or somebody who is suicidal and policing resources are needed.

“We should not be going out and dealing with the sort of mundane mental health incidents which we do find ourselves doing frequently.”

There were 494,159 incidents flagged as mental-health related in 2018, a 28% increase on the 385,206 incidents in 2014, according to research from the BBC.

Steve called for a more collaborative approach with other agencies, adding: “Ultimately we will always be available to deal with those incidents where there sort of violence or people who are self-harming. We will always go to these incidents because we’re obviously equipped to deal with them.

“But we can’t be used as essentially a backstop and sending officers to deal with complex mental health issues when they’re not really trained to deal with them. It’s not really ideal for us and it leaves our members exposed if anything was to go wrong at some of those incidents.”