John MacDonald: Don't panic about the police mental health call-out changes

Canterbury Mornings with John MacDonald

From today, the police don’t intend to respond to every mental health callout. But I don’t think we’re going to see any major difference. I’ll tell you why shortly,. And it’s based on an experience I had on Friday night.

So if you’re worried about the police saying “not our department” if you call up, as of today, about someone having a mental health issue - don’t panic.

But you know the background to this and what’s led to today’s change with the threshold for transporting mental health patients increasing; there’ll be fewer visits to mental health clinics; and police handovers to mental health staff will be shorter than what they have been.

So 11 percent. That’s a key stat. Before today, 11 percent of police work involved mental health call-outs. And, as Chris Cahill from the Police Association was saying on Newstalk ZB today, whenever the cops are called-out to one of these jobs - it can keep them away from doing other police work for hours.

He says, on average, a mental health callout keeps police tied-up for three hours - sometimes as long as five or six hours.

So Chris Cahill is pleased about these changes coming into force today. One thing he isn’t happy about, though, is that it’s being forced by the police. As he said this morning, Health NZ hasn’t come to the party itself on this one.

He says police will still turn up if people are at-risk of harming themselves or harming someone else but, if nothing changes, police will still be swamped by mental health callouts and the health system needs to “step up” and look after these people.

The reason the police get so involved is that police officers are the only people who have the power to contain people and they can be invaluable in situations where someone is mentally distressed.

Chris Cahill, though, says the experience overseas where police have pulled back from mental health callouts, he says patients have ended up getting the treatment they need sooner.

Now I don’t know about that. Because I haven’t been able to find anything to support that online today.

And remember it is Chris Cahill’s job to represent police officers who are at the coalface when it comes to mental health callouts and who know full-well how these callouts impact their ability to deal with genuine criminal activity.

Because that’s been the argument the police have made all along. That, just because someone is in a state of mental despair, it doesn’t mean they’re a criminal. Which makes perfect sense.

But, as we know, sometimes a person can be more inclined to commit criminal behaviour than they usually would because of their mental distress.

Which is why the police have, in recent years, become the default responders in situations like these.

That, if someone is a threat to either their own safety or someone else’s safety, then call the cops.

Which is the situation I found myself in on Friday. It was about 5:30pm and I was in the centre of town.

I saw this guy who looked like he was crossing the road one minute, then walking back onto the footpath, and going around in circles, then trying to cross the road again. And drivers were tooting at him and there were a couple of people watching him.

And I went up to them and said ‘is that guy ok?’. Now - one weird thing - was the number of people who seemed prepared just to watch what was going on. There were people standing on the balconies of their apartments looking down at the street. Another guy was closer to the action. And he was who I spoke to initially.

Then the guy himself - who was pretty dazed - came up towards me and I tried to have a word with him. But he wasn’t making much sense. He was wearing a bike helmet and I could see a bike nearby but he said he hadn’t fallen off. But he just wasn’t making much sense.

And he tried to walk off in the opposite direction of where his bike was. So a few young guys who were staying at the backpackers across the road and I got him to stop and have a sit down on the footpath. And I knew I had to call for help. And, at that point, I thought we were dealing potentially with someone who diabetic or something like that, so called St John’s.

I went through the rigmarole of describing what was going on and the ambo operator got me to ask the guy if he was on any medication. So I did, and he said something about “mental health” - but that was about it. So I passed that on and the operator said they’d logged the job and asked us to stay with this guy.

Not that long after that a cop car turned up. And, as soon as the cops got out, it was clear they knew what had been going on and they said that the ambo people were snowed under and they’d asked the police to deal with it.

So they had a chat with the guy, found some prescription stuff in his bag, they seemed to think that he hadn’t taken his meds and they put him in the back of the police car to take him to hospital to get checked out.

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