In a major overhaul of its approach to mental health-related calls, Police is redefining its role and responsibilities in this complex and challenging area.

It’s a shift the Police Association has repeatedly petitioned for, last year lobbying Police to consider implementing the UK’s Right Care, Right Person mental health model.

The right time has arrived.

From next month, Police will begin rolling out its Mental Health Response Change Programme, which Commissioner Andrew Coster says will give those in mental distress “the right help at the right time from the right people”.

Recent research has shown 11% of 111 calls have a mental health component. That’s one mental health-related call every seven minutes, taking up about 500,000 hours of frontline time per year. Of those mental health events, only 5% had a criminal element and only 11% were coded P1 and given a priority response, the commissioner says.

“It has been clear to me for some time that this is simply not sustainable and prevents us from keeping other areas of the community safe.”

The redefined Police mental health role is to focus on immediate and serious risk to the distressed individual or others and serious offending.

"Safety is very important to us. No frontline cops want to see nurses assaulted or anything. That's the absolute last thing that we want. But we can’t be their default security guards.” - Inspector Matt Morris, Police Mental Health Response Change Programme lead

Taking care of business

Inspector Matt Morris is steering the change programme, ensuring frontline officers are equipped to navigate the coming changes.

“My key messaging is that this is a fourphase change, not a sudden, overnight transformation,” Matt says. “We appreciate it will be quite tricky for staff to manage, but it’s the only fair way to do it with our health partners.”

Phase 1, set to be implemented from November 1, focuses on “tidying up procedural matters and parts that we obviously shouldn't be so involved in”, Matt says. The subsequent phases will be more difficult, “largely because there’s more risk involved”.

Matt says Police is acutely aware of officer concerns of potential conflict with health sector workers, particularly in emergency departments (EDs), so there will be clear guidelines on what belongs to Police in the mental health space and what doesn’t.

“Despite all the good intentions and with Health and Police working together, when you progress a change like this, frontline staff can sometimes end up in debates,” he says. “We're emphasising that you try everything you can not to get involved in [those].”

Matt says he understands why Health call on Police to help but it’s an incorrect use of Police resources. The burden for making the call on police attendance at non-emergency mental health calls and when they can leave EDs will, down the track, shift from frontline officers to district command centres.

“Safety is very important to us. No frontline cops want to see nurses assaulted or anything. That's the absolute last thing that we want. But we can’t be their default security guards.

“It’s important that both Police and Health understand what is Police business,” Matt says.

“There isn’t a piece of existing extensive research that says police should be responding to so much mental health work and sitting with people in EDs unless there is a real safety risk... We don't want to do that any more. It was time to make some decisions and Police is moving forward.”

Right person, right place

Matt visited the Metropolitan Police (the Met) in London and Humberside Police, which was the first UK jurisdictions to implement the Right Care, Right Person model.

However, New Zealand couldn’t simply replicate the UK approach because of the differences in operational structures – the UK’s localised county models which operate independently and Aotearoa’s national structure.

Matt also noted that the UK programmes were not an overnight success.

“It took [Humberside] years to progress change and a lot of people read about the Met issuing an ultimatum to Health, but that also only came after years of engagement with partners. In talking to the UK recently, there are still challenges but there’s been a positive systemic shift.”

A key challenge for New Zealand is managing public and partner expectations that Police is the default responder for mental health-related calls. That mindset shift is crucial to free up police for core policing.

“The law ultimately drives our business and, strangely, in the mental health space, because of a lack of understanding of it, we've strayed from the law [that covers that area]. We’re operating in the middle and we have few rules. It's a bit like a free-for-all.

“Right now, our absolute priority is to do what the law says we should – fight crime, tackle crime – and that's what we intend to do, to safely get officers back on the street.

“We are giving staff guidelines and as long as they follow those, make good safety assessments and have good justification for the decision making at the time, they will be well protected from potential issues. Later, if a review finds a fault, it’s a fault with the guidelines, not the officer.”

Matt urges members to read the dedicated page in Ten One.

“As the guidelines and manual chapters come online in the phases, it’s important police are aware of them. If not, they’re going to end up in more arguments than necessary,” Matt says.