Police officers in London (Picture: Luke McKernan)
The Metropolitan Police says from September it will only attend 999 calls linked to mental health where there is an “immediate threat to life”. It said it wanted officers to concentrate on crime, and that people with mental health issues should not be its priority.
Other frontline health services, such as ambulances, will be expected to attend all such calls—despite being massively overstretched. That could mean that someone suffering a mental health crisis and in danger is left waiting endlessly for help—or no help ever arriving.
The Met’s decision highlights the way criminalisation is interwoven into the way people with mental health difficulties are treated. The police are used regularly against people in crisis. Section 136 of the mental health act gives them the power to “remove someone to a place of safety”.
It is a sign of how over-run mental health services are that they are now reliant on cops to play a key role in safeguarding.
Police are not the right people to send to vulnerable people in crisis. The sight of uniformed cops armed with tasers, handcuffs and truncheons is designed to frighten and intimidate.
And their interactions with black people often result in unnecessary physical restraint—and worse. That’s why the recent Black Lives Matter movement rightly demanded the police be defunded, and the money diverted to mental health services instead.
Refugees slam plans to tear up asylum system
But where there is repression, there is resistance.
Strikers are demanding an unallocated €1.6 billion go towards workers' pay rise
London march on 27 October
