![Sample our Law journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5942/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Law.jpg"})
Abstract
The Mental Health Intervention Team (MHIT) programme was developed by New South Wales Police Force (NSWPF) to improve police capacity to respond efficiently and safely to incidents involving persons with a mental illness (PWMI). The programme was initiated in 2008 in three Local Area Commands, wherein 111 officers received enhanced training. It has since been funded for roll-out across the Force. In this paper, we evaluate the success of the MHIT against its key aims: to reduce injury to police and people with a mental illness during their interactions, to enhance awareness amongst police of issues relating to mental illness and how best to mitigate these, to improve interagency collaboration in responding to PWMI and to reduce the amount of unnecessary time police spend on mental health events. We conclude that the MHIT led to increased confidence among police in dealing with mental health-related events, reduced police involvement in transportation of PWMI and improved handover between police and mental health care services. Despite such positive findings, difficulties with interagency cooperation remained, which – we argue – reflects differences in organisational and accountability structures, and concern among NSWPF's partners about the flow-on implications for their own resources. One remedy, we conclude, may lie in a fundamental reconfiguration of public sector responses to PWMI.
Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge the contributions to this work made by Dr Isabelle Bartkowiak-Theron, who was part of the early project team, as well as Katrina Clifford, Pota F. Lawrence, Sharon Ryle and Imelda Daniels who worked as research assistants on the project. We would also like to acknowledge our funders, New South Wales Police Force and Charles Sturt University, and the assistance of the MHIT team and all of our participants in completing this research.
Notes
1. We use the term persons with a mental illness (PWMI) to refer to both those who have a mental illness, and those who police suspect may have a mental illness.
2. Mental Health Act events’ are events, recorded by police, in which they exercised their powers under the Mental Health Act (NSW) Citation2007
3. Mental Health Contact Officers are duty inspectors in a LAC with carriage of the customer service portfolio (encompassing complaint resolution, managing the LAC's response times, as well as mental health concerns).
4. Coercive force is defined as the physical interventions police use to ensure a member of the public complies with a request. Categories of coercive force include physical force (hands-on contact), restraint (handcuffing), and threat or use of appointments (including OC spray, firearms and Tasers).
5. Other’ events refers to those that are not related to either suspected mental health or drug-induced psychosis. For clarity, this distinction is not one that would be reflected in recorded police data, and relies on an individual officer's (the respondent's) perception of the event.
6. A key aim of the MHIT was to reduce time spent waiting at handover points. This time can be regarded as dead time, given that presentation by police of a PWMI passes the care of that individual to NSW Health. This, in theory, negates the need for the continued presence of police, unless the individual is violent. In practice, police report being required by health staff to wait until the PWMI has been assessed, even where there is no risk posed by the PWMI.
7. Officers were asked how long their last Mental Health Act event took, and whether this event was representative of their usual experience. Only representative events were included in this analysis, which equated to 109 officers pre-training (T1) and 38 who were surveyed 18 months after training (T3).
8. Data from 20 MHIT trained officers interviewed 18 months after training were compared with that from 16 non-MHIT trained officers.