>#Police force ‘losing hours’ to mental health calls – and plans to bill the local authority
>__Bedfordshire Police said the demand from non crime related calls meant officers were unable to do the job they signed up for__
>By Martin Evans, CRIME CORRESPONDENT
>16 July 2022 • 2:27pm
>A police force is to start sending bills to the local authority after revealing that officers spent more than 50,000 hours last year dealing with mental health related calls.
>Bedfordshire Police said the demand from non crime related calls meant officers were unable to do the job they signed up for.
>Festus Akinbusoye, the local Police and Crime Commissioner, said the force had received more than 10,000 calls for mental health related matters in 2021, equating to 53,000 police hours.
>He said the situation could not go on and in future he was planning to send the bill for the lost police hours to the relevant authority.
>__Police responding when social services cannot__
>Giving one example, Mr Akinbusoye said two officers had spent nine hours of their shift driving a vulnerable child to another part of the country because social services had been unable to help.
>And he said thousands of police hours were being lost each year on ‘hospital watch’ where officers were forced to sit in accident and emergency units with people who had been injured in incident but were not under arrest.
>Mr Akinbusoye said such distractions were preventing officers from being out on the beat catching criminals and it was not fair on council tax payers.
>He said: “If you ask any member of the public what they think the police should be doing they will tell you they should be going after criminals, catching them and locking them up.
>”In 2021 there were 10,000 calls for mental health related jobs that equated to 53,000 police hours.
>”Police forces don’t say no. They say yes to everything. But some forces are now refusing to take those jobs and the demand for those types of jobs has fallen by 70 per cent.
>”Police officers are now providing the service that local authorities and mental health should be providing, at no cost, and my taxpayers, who are paying the police precept, that is not what they want the police doing and so someone has got to pay for it.”
>”So. I have already announced during my delivery board meeting this week that I am going to start sending the bill to the local authorities and the clinical commissioning groups for mental health. It just cannot continue.”
Good government, spend more money sending undesirables to Rwanda instead.
So long as the police accept the precedent this sets and burglary victims can start billing the police, sure. Likewise the council should start billing the police for the cost of things like graffiti and vandalism, not to mention the time social workers spend dealing with the effects of crime like domestic violence and child abuse. This could get very silly, very quickly.
And that’s what happens when you cut back services. The problems don’t go away, they just get pushed onto another service.
Cut Sure Start centres? The NHS picks up the slack.
Cut mental health crisis support? The police and ambulance services pick up the slack.
The police tend to be the ones who pick up more of the dropped services because they’re the most “general” of the emergency services.
Cuts to essential services don’t save money, they just move the cost onto a different deparment’s budget.
Yeah, almost as though cutting medical and social care while expecting untrained heavily armed workers to do the job instead was a bad idea!!??
I’d guess people join the police to be a hero and stop crime, not babysit. Work satisfaction must be crap.
The problem with mental health is it covers the balance between health, and safety. Sure call an ambulance because it’s a health issue, but an ambulance can frankly do sweet FA especially if the patient has capacity….. which most do. What they can’t do is sit with a patient for hours on end to ensure their safety whilst there’s no social service available to manage this.
The police on the other hand can’t do anything about the health, but part of their remit is to ensure the safety of people, what they can do is sit with people, what they shouldn’t be doing is sitting with people.
The reality is that mental health services need to expand, rapidly and right now. Or emergency services just start telling suicidal people to crack on and refuse to start attending until there’s been an actual suicide attempt, or threat of harm to someone else, or actual harm caused to someone else or themselves. That may seem uncaring, and possibly even immoral, however with the knock on effect of MH services not sorting their business out this may well be the eventual outcome.
“Just jump already I’ve got to ruin 2 more teenagers lives before noon”
Huh. Seen a few of these today.
Is blaming people for not wanting to live in abject misery the new culture war?
I suppose it ties into trans rights from a bigot’s perspective so it’s an easy tangent.
A few years ago my girlfriend was living in supported living run by Rethink. One night when I was staying over the neighbour across the hall had been shouting on and off for hours and we could hear a hel of a lot of banging and crashing.
Of course there are no staff available at the weekend to “support” the people living there, and the mental health crisis team strait up refused to do anything (isn’t that what their role is supposed to entail – responding to mental health crisis) and told us to call the police if we were worried. So we did and when they arrived they handled the situation very well, but the two other services which should have been at hand to help instead were not.
A few weeks ago I had a police officer collect a food parcel from me at the local food bank hub. It was for an elderly woman who was discussing suicide as she wasn’t receiving support as a victim of crime. He was on limited duties because of injuries but wanted to be on traffic duty rather than providing social care, that he wasn’t trained for.
Earlier I have provided a food parcel to police welfare officers for victims of crime.
In their contact with me, these police officers are essentially providing the same services as local government front line workers for people in need.
They aren’t fighting crime so who is? I was recently robbed.
This is precisely what “defund the police” is about. It’s a primarily American concern, but the statement does have value over here as well.
It’s not about cutting back on policing number as such, but more about reallocating some of their funding into social care. What’s the use of reducing money to mental health services, if the people who need to access them will just end up wasting police time instead.
There’s just no mental health services at all.
In April I had a huge MH crisis I ended up having a few S attempts and each time I had the police called out to me by other people, the switchboard themselves are routing MH crisis’s to the police. It got to the point that the police wanted me committed but the NHS wont because there is no room on the psych wards and the psych hospitals are also full. So the NHS put me in this acute help program that lasts 2 weeks and basically all they did is phone me every other day asking if I’m ok and that’s it.
To this day I still have not received help for my mental health.
Should be billing central government – they are the ones responsible rather than local authorities who have had their funding slashed – and slashed more in areas of most need for services like this.
Good for them. The police aren’t social workers. You want them to do extra duties, you should have to pay them more money.
My experience of mental health support from 111 has essentially been:
“Have you had any thoughts or harming yourself recently”
“No but I really need help before things escalate”
“Sorry, you’re on your own. We will refer you to your local mental health service again so that you can remain on the 8 month waitlist”
It’s hardly surprising that the police are having to deal with the consequences of this.
15 comments
>#Police force ‘losing hours’ to mental health calls – and plans to bill the local authority
>__Bedfordshire Police said the demand from non crime related calls meant officers were unable to do the job they signed up for__
>By Martin Evans, CRIME CORRESPONDENT
>16 July 2022 • 2:27pm
>A police force is to start sending bills to the local authority after revealing that officers spent more than 50,000 hours last year dealing with mental health related calls.
>Bedfordshire Police said the demand from non crime related calls meant officers were unable to do the job they signed up for.
>Festus Akinbusoye, the local Police and Crime Commissioner, said the force had received more than 10,000 calls for mental health related matters in 2021, equating to 53,000 police hours.
>He said the situation could not go on and in future he was planning to send the bill for the lost police hours to the relevant authority.
>__Police responding when social services cannot__
>Giving one example, Mr Akinbusoye said two officers had spent nine hours of their shift driving a vulnerable child to another part of the country because social services had been unable to help.
>And he said thousands of police hours were being lost each year on ‘hospital watch’ where officers were forced to sit in accident and emergency units with people who had been injured in incident but were not under arrest.
>Mr Akinbusoye said such distractions were preventing officers from being out on the beat catching criminals and it was not fair on council tax payers.
>He said: “If you ask any member of the public what they think the police should be doing they will tell you they should be going after criminals, catching them and locking them up.
>”In 2021 there were 10,000 calls for mental health related jobs that equated to 53,000 police hours.
>”Police forces don’t say no. They say yes to everything. But some forces are now refusing to take those jobs and the demand for those types of jobs has fallen by 70 per cent.
>”Police officers are now providing the service that local authorities and mental health should be providing, at no cost, and my taxpayers, who are paying the police precept, that is not what they want the police doing and so someone has got to pay for it.”
>”So. I have already announced during my delivery board meeting this week that I am going to start sending the bill to the local authorities and the clinical commissioning groups for mental health. It just cannot continue.”
Good government, spend more money sending undesirables to Rwanda instead.
So long as the police accept the precedent this sets and burglary victims can start billing the police, sure. Likewise the council should start billing the police for the cost of things like graffiti and vandalism, not to mention the time social workers spend dealing with the effects of crime like domestic violence and child abuse. This could get very silly, very quickly.
And that’s what happens when you cut back services. The problems don’t go away, they just get pushed onto another service.
Cut Sure Start centres? The NHS picks up the slack.
Cut mental health crisis support? The police and ambulance services pick up the slack.
The police tend to be the ones who pick up more of the dropped services because they’re the most “general” of the emergency services.
Cuts to essential services don’t save money, they just move the cost onto a different deparment’s budget.
Yeah, almost as though cutting medical and social care while expecting untrained heavily armed workers to do the job instead was a bad idea!!??
I’d guess people join the police to be a hero and stop crime, not babysit. Work satisfaction must be crap.
The problem with mental health is it covers the balance between health, and safety. Sure call an ambulance because it’s a health issue, but an ambulance can frankly do sweet FA especially if the patient has capacity….. which most do. What they can’t do is sit with a patient for hours on end to ensure their safety whilst there’s no social service available to manage this.
The police on the other hand can’t do anything about the health, but part of their remit is to ensure the safety of people, what they can do is sit with people, what they shouldn’t be doing is sitting with people.
The reality is that mental health services need to expand, rapidly and right now. Or emergency services just start telling suicidal people to crack on and refuse to start attending until there’s been an actual suicide attempt, or threat of harm to someone else, or actual harm caused to someone else or themselves. That may seem uncaring, and possibly even immoral, however with the knock on effect of MH services not sorting their business out this may well be the eventual outcome.
“Just jump already I’ve got to ruin 2 more teenagers lives before noon”
Huh. Seen a few of these today.
Is blaming people for not wanting to live in abject misery the new culture war?
I suppose it ties into trans rights from a bigot’s perspective so it’s an easy tangent.
A few years ago my girlfriend was living in supported living run by Rethink. One night when I was staying over the neighbour across the hall had been shouting on and off for hours and we could hear a hel of a lot of banging and crashing.
Of course there are no staff available at the weekend to “support” the people living there, and the mental health crisis team strait up refused to do anything (isn’t that what their role is supposed to entail – responding to mental health crisis) and told us to call the police if we were worried. So we did and when they arrived they handled the situation very well, but the two other services which should have been at hand to help instead were not.
A few weeks ago I had a police officer collect a food parcel from me at the local food bank hub. It was for an elderly woman who was discussing suicide as she wasn’t receiving support as a victim of crime. He was on limited duties because of injuries but wanted to be on traffic duty rather than providing social care, that he wasn’t trained for.
Earlier I have provided a food parcel to police welfare officers for victims of crime.
In their contact with me, these police officers are essentially providing the same services as local government front line workers for people in need.
They aren’t fighting crime so who is? I was recently robbed.
This is precisely what “defund the police” is about. It’s a primarily American concern, but the statement does have value over here as well.
It’s not about cutting back on policing number as such, but more about reallocating some of their funding into social care. What’s the use of reducing money to mental health services, if the people who need to access them will just end up wasting police time instead.
There’s just no mental health services at all.
In April I had a huge MH crisis I ended up having a few S attempts and each time I had the police called out to me by other people, the switchboard themselves are routing MH crisis’s to the police. It got to the point that the police wanted me committed but the NHS wont because there is no room on the psych wards and the psych hospitals are also full. So the NHS put me in this acute help program that lasts 2 weeks and basically all they did is phone me every other day asking if I’m ok and that’s it.
To this day I still have not received help for my mental health.
Should be billing central government – they are the ones responsible rather than local authorities who have had their funding slashed – and slashed more in areas of most need for services like this.
Good for them. The police aren’t social workers. You want them to do extra duties, you should have to pay them more money.
My experience of mental health support from 111 has essentially been:
“Have you had any thoughts or harming yourself recently”
“No but I really need help before things escalate”
“Sorry, you’re on your own. We will refer you to your local mental health service again so that you can remain on the 8 month waitlist”
It’s hardly surprising that the police are having to deal with the consequences of this.