THE police are planning to reduce their role in mental health emergencies.

A new policy framework, the National Partnership Agreement, will change the way police in England and Wales respond to mental health incidents.

Police officers will no longer carry out welfare checks on patients who have missed hospital appointments. 

There is a two-year transition period in which police forces will reduce to less than a third the proportion of incidents to which they will respond. The agreement anticipates that the health services will pick up the remainder of cases.

The commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Mark Rowley, said his officers will cease responding to mental health callouts from next month unless there is a threat to life.

London’s police force, which is most responsive to government direction and only weakly accountable to the capital’s mayor, is both the largest force and traditionally a policy leader.

Tory Policing Minister Chris Philp put a gloss on the issue, arguing that: “The police have been responding to a very large volume of mental health cases, which isn’t of course the best thing for the person concerned because what they need is medical assistance, not a police officer turning up.”

He claimed an additional £2.3 billion in funding will go to mental health facilities by April 2024 with £150 million towards buildings. More vague was a claim that a 24-hour mental health crisis phone line will be instituted.

There is a strong sense among mental health professionals that the role of the police is problematic.

The Centre for Mental Health argues that while people in a mental health emergency should always get speedy, effective and compassionate care, too often this is not the case. 

“And for many, the involvement of the police makes them feel criminalised.”

Centre for Mental Health chief executive Andy Bell said: “Reducing police involvement in mental health crisis responses will only work if more appropriate staff are in place to meet people’s needs and keep them safe. There must be no gaps in support.”

The Local Government Association is concerned that the scheme is being rolled out too quickly, with inadequate local engagement, meaning that other agencies risk being unable to pick up any increases in demand.

The LGA says: “NHS leaders will be concerned that there is no additional resources attached to the publication of the National Partnership Agreement, but there is some recognition that implementation cannot be cost neutral. It is likely that the NHS will need additional capital funding, revenue and the workforce in place.”

And the NHS Confederation points out that the police have particular duties under the Mental Health Act 1983, that only they can perform.

Mental health professionals are caught in a dilemma. They worry that the NHS will not get the necessary resources to deal with what amounts to a mental health crisis but, like many sectors in British society, are highly ambivalent about the role of the police and are deeply disturbed by a gathering catalogue of incidents in which public trust in both individual police officers and the institution itself is deeply damaged.

For the police this policy change is both a bid to diminish the call on their own resources which, like all public services, feels the continuing effects of Tory and coalition austerity and an attempt by some elements to focus more on what they consider their core enforcement roles and abandon what some officers dismiss as the “social work” aspects of their duties.

This raises the question of what actual role the police perform in a modern society and how this is changed by the intensifying social crises which accompany the general, systemic crisis of modern capitalism. 

One part of the myth-making around policing focuses on the subsidiary role it has come to play in providing emergency responses to social crises and there is some evidence that some entrants to the police see this as a positive feature of the work. 

And, of course, irrespective of how significant this is in the totality of policing, it is part of the legitimisation processes that surround policing in politics, the media and public perceptions.

Media representations of the police as an institution are contradictory and in sharp conflict with reality. 

The representation of individual police officers as variously venal, self-serving, corrupt, brutal, public-spirited, resolute in crime fighting, compassionate and troubled by the nature of their work — but always pro-active — is somewhat at variance with the largely routine, bureaucratic and mundane nature of their duties. 

Crime-fighting, if this is a police priority, is a low-intensity operation with, according to official figures, each of London’s 33,984 police officers making an arrest once every four months.

Crime itself bears little resemblance to either popular conceptions or media representations. Traditional crime (that is all crime except fraud and cybercrime) has fallen by 75 per cent since 1995, although public understanding of this is obscured by the various moral panics which politicians, media and the police promote.

However, these traditional forms of crime (burglary, car theft, low-level assaults and so on) have been replaced by new forms of crime. 

While it is still true that different classes and social strata encounter the police in different ways, there is something of a convergence in the way that police regard themselves as alienated from the people as whole.

The sharp end of this phenomenon is “stop and search,” about which few illusions remain. Police officers have the power to stop and search you if they have “reasonable grounds to suspect” you’ve committed a crime or are carrying an illegal item.

But the government wants to make it easier for police officers to use so-called Section 60 stop-and-search powers which allow officers to search people without any actual suspicion. 

And you are 10 times more likely to be subjected to it if you’re black — even though the rate at which the police find prohibited items is broadly similar across all ethnic groups.

Of course, like all institutions, especially in class-divided societies, the police are inclined to seeming irrational patterns of activity, misallocation of resources and great contradictions between their formal roles and the real nature of much of their activity.

Nevertheless, both at the institutional level and among policing professionals, the academics who work with and for the police and even across government at local and even national level, there are some surprisingly acute observations to be made.

At the policy level there is a clear understanding that the police fail to deal with the sharp rise in reported rape. In less than a decade it increased by 240 per cent and over the same period reported domestic violence rose by 50 per cent.

Over half of crime affecting people in England and Wales is fraud and cybercrime, but just 0.6 per cent of such crimes are recorded, while just 0.1 per cent of fraud results in a charge or summons.

There is an increasing awareness that traditional and benign notions of the relationship between police and the public do not correspond to the reality of rising social tensions, industrial action and climate change activism.

Only fundamental reform would reverse the crisis of confidence in policing is the conclusion reached by Sir Michael Barber who chaired the Strategic Review of Policing instituted by the Police Foundation.

The Policing Review reports that the number of protest events has risen steadily over the last decade, going from 83 in 2007 to 280 in 2016 and the number of protests involving confrontational tactics increased from seven in 2000 to 126 in 2019.

Of course, the police are highly sensitive to challenges to their legitimacy. Labour movement veterans used to the 1970s picket-line confrontations and to the state violence unleashed by the police on the 1980s miners’ strike are amused to see police today studiously ignoring the open breaches of the law limiting pickets to six in number as “official” pickets are outnumbered by supporters and picket-line chants are drowned out by tooting car horns.

All states command a monopoly of force and the British state, with its long experience in maintaining capitalist relations of production at home and abroad, is careful to maintain a substantial reserve of organised force, of which the public face of the police is but one element.

We should always be aware that policing is always informed by very considerable intelligence-gathering resources, a detailed and general surveillance of potential challenges to political power well beyond the general need to keep a watchful eye on the threats of terrorism that arise from the exercise of British state power in other people’s countries.

There is a certain sense that the role of the police needs to be recalibrated so that, in the words of the review, “they can focus on those tasks where their powers and competencies are most efficacious.”

As the statistics bear out, it is not that the police are not very effective crime-fighters but that in relation to some areas of growing crime they are not that at all.

The principal and irreducible role of the police in any class society — including, incidentally, socialist societies where the state’s monopoly of force is deployed to defend socialist relations of production — is to maintain the existing order.

That this is presented as meaning order in general is a mystification. The legitimacy of the police cannot survive powerful and popular challenges to the existing order under any system and the police force in general cannot act independently of political authority.

The fact is that where conflicting interests cannot be resolved or negotiated, the monopoly of force commanded by the state and devolved to the police loses its provisional legitimacy.

The strength of the Policing Review is that it recognises the objective character of the issues surrounding policing in contemporary class-divided Britain and has sensible things to say about crime and about the institutional problems of the police — rigid authority, a lack of strategic thinking, organisational reform, racist practices and staff turnover.

Its weakness is that it proceeds as if these problems can be resolved by reforms that can be implemented independently of increasingly conflicted social tensions.

A deep illusion suffuses the report when it argues, quite correctly, that “there is a crisis of confidence in policing in this country which is corroding public trust. The reasons are deep rooted and complex — some cultural and others systemic.” 

But it concludes that, “however, taken together, unless there is urgent change, they will end up destroying the principle of policing by consent that has been at the heart of British policing for decades.”

This is nonsense.