Police should not be involved in responses to mental health because they can escalate the situation and mental distress, according to new research for the first time led by Australians with lived experience.
A report by La Trobe University, Police apprehension as a response to mental distress, presents the research findings, principles and reform agendas to inform appropriate and dignifying responses to mental distress.
The report comes as reform could be on the horizon in some states.
New South Wales’s minister for mental health this month flagged significant reforms to the way police respond to people in acute distress as she conceded there were instances in which the current system “has failed”, while Victoria has yet to implement the health-led response to mental distress which was recommended from its royal commission two years ago.
The project was conceived by academics with a lived experience of police apprehension in a mental health crisis, with findings based on interviews over a 10-month period in 2021-2022 with 20 participants with experience of mental health-related police intervention in Australia.
Removing police as responders was identified as the first of six reform agendas the report identified, as “participants expressed a unanimous preference that police are not involved in responses to mental health”.
Chris Maylea, an associate professor at La Trobe Law School, said “people who we spoke to didn’t see the police response as coming to help them. They saw the police response as coming to apprehend them, and take them away.”
Maylea said “people told us they preferred ambulance responding rather than police. But when we asked them what they actually wanted, it wasn’t either ambulance or police. What they wanted was someone to come and listen to them and talk to them and make them feel like things were going to be OK.”
Maylea said neither police nor ambulance workers are equipped for mental health responses as they don’t have adequate time as both emergency agencies are often rushing off to their next job.
Ambulance workers’ skills are more focused on physical health, rather than mental health issues, he said. “What people really wanted was a mental health-specific response to mental distress.”
In order of priority, the other five reform agendas were investing in alternative responses, developing peer response models, focus on prevention, accountability and reparations when harm is caused by services, and training for police in responding to people in distress.
One of the interviewees, Arwin Kraze, a Melbourne man who lives with bipolar disorder and schizoaffective disorder, found himself in a phone booth with a broken beer bottle and a garbage bin lid during the psychotic episode which preceded his third admission to hospital.
After police failed to talk him out of the booth, they set police dogs on him and swung batons at him from either side of the booth, leaving him with lacerations on his forehead and hand, as well as dog bites on his leg.
Kraze said he might have more easily emerged from the phone booth had a responder given him the time he needed, and simply offered him a bag of chips and a can of Coke.
“When I’m unwell I’m a pain in the rase, but I’m not a criminal,” Kraze said.
Panos Karanikolas, a PhD candidate in criminology and a member of the lived experience group of academics leading the project, described the two occasions he was taken by police to mental health inpatient units as traumatic.
“My entry to the mental health system at a young age was really was very confronting, to be taken by a police and it really impacted my trust with the mental health system in general.
“Police training and culture is not suited to feeling understood, feeling heard, feeling supported,” he said.
La Trobe’s report coincides with the release of Inner Melbourne Community Legal’s report Community Legal Mental Health Partnership Project which has recommended police should not act as first responders in order to reduce the instances of people experiencing mental health crisis being charged for conduct that occurs during a crisis.
IMLC’s director of legal practice, Molly Williams, said “Too often when people are responded to by police, they’re criminalised in the context of that response.”
Williams said when police intervene, the person will often become more distressed, and the situation will escalate, leading to the person being sectioned under the Mental Health Act, or end up with criminal charges.
The IMLC report recommends that community lawyers intervene in mental health patients earlier, as often there are pressures, such as debt, which can build up and precipitate a mental health crisis.
