The decision last week by the Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, that in future his officers will attend emergency calls related to mental health only where a threat to life is feared, was both a wake-up call and a threat. His letter, and deadline of 31 August, have raised the stakes in negotiations with health bosses. The danger is that his combative approach will undermine attempts to find a solution to a problem that no one denies.
Sir Mark is right that people with severe mental illness should be looked after by health workers, not police. The enormous amount of time that his officers spend in A&E departments with mentally ill people waiting to be treated should be reduced. Situations such as the one described last year by the former West Midlands chief Sir David Thompson, in which a child having a mental health crisis lived in a police station for two days because there was nowhere else for her to go, should shame us all.
