I would like to attempt to slay one of the biggest fallacies in all of the debate about how the Mental Health Act should operate, not least because it often happens in connection with operational policing.  And I’m going to fail – because I know that the very proposition I’m about to tackle will lead to the proposition being repeated as proof that the attack on it is fallacious!  You’ll have heard it said many times, especially by Approved Mental Health Professionals (AMHPs) – “you can’t section someone unless you’ve got a bed”.  Also, “You can’t make an application [under the MHA] unless you know you’ve got a bed”.

We’ve seen this play out in Coroner’s courts, most notably in recent times in the death of David Stacey where this whole ‘bed’ thing ended up with a finding of legal neglect contributed to David’s death.  There was discussion in that case and a Preventing Future Deaths notice about legal compliance and like David’s case, this stuff often unfolds in connection with...

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The next time the Home Office publish statistics on the use of s136 and the locations to which people are removed after use of police powers under the MHA, we should learn that it’s down in to double figures – under 100 for the whole country. Given that it was over 11,000 around 2008, this is quite an achievement, on the face of things. Of course, it’s always going to be “right” that people in crisis access settings which not custodial, like prisons or police stations, and the 2017 amendments to the Mental Health Act preventing the use of police cells as Place of Safety in all but the most exceptional circumstances for adults.

To provoke debate and prompt thought amongst my fellow police inspectors who must authorise this stuff(!), I would never, ever authorise the use of a police station in exceptional circumstances. This is mainly because someone matching the criteria would be at grave risk away from the kind of urgent medical support that would (or should) be available in mental health units or emergency departments and...

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Last week, the prosecution of a defendant under new legislation specific to emergency services personal was was abandoned as “not in the public interest” after a defendant had been charged with spitting at a police officer. The headline in the Daily Telegraph did a cracking job of conveying vagueness about the reasons behind this and because it relates to the mental state of the defendant, I thought a short blog of pure speculation on my part may be helpful to considering what may have gone on here.

First things first, the decision to abandon this prosecution was obviously nothing whatsoever to do with the fact it was new legislation and it was not a statement that spitting at police officers (or anyone else) is not in the public interest to pursue. Despite my reaction to the specifics of this being as uninformed as everyone else’s, what did strike me was how this was about the coverage and social media reaction to the Crown Prosecution Service decision was apparently focussed on whether this says something about the...

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