I want to start 2020 by saying thank you for the great work over the seasonal period. We came back after what is a generally a busy period in good shape. This is very much my reflection of 2019. We are all pulling together! 2020 is a big year so let me make a few points:

We are reliable: Call handling times are good. There is a good use of webchat. We are much more reliable on attendance to calls. Great work.

We are cutting crime: Homicides have reduced. Burglary and vehicle crime are falling as are firearms discharges. Robbery is static. There are promising signs on violence. Positive outcome rates in these key crimes are good. Great work.

We have challenges: There is a big pressure to reduce outstanding domestic abuse offenders. This area of demand is still going up. We want to bring more people to justice for rape. Everyone needs to support PPU colleagues who work so hard. We need to make a bigger dent in violence.

We are recruiting: We are recruiting around 24 police officers a week. That’s not just to replace...

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One of the last things I did at the College of Policing was attend a meeting in London with the Crown Prosecution Service who had begun to review their guidance on the ‘prosecution of mentally disordered offenders’. The CPS issue prosecution guidance on a large number of topics, all publicly available on their website and they’d decided mental health guidance needed revising. First things first: the title of the old guidance sounded date and pejorative by modern standards so I’m glad to find that new guidance gets rid of the term ‘mentally disordered offenders’. Apart from anything else, as Professor Jill PEAY points out in her (wonderful) book “Mental Health and Crime” from 2010, it’s not a straight-forward enterprise to determine a mentally ‘disordered’ offender from a mentally ‘ordered’ one.

So in October 2019, the CPS issued two new documents –

If you’re involved in criminal investigation in the police, you’ll need to read both of these.

CAPACITY

In light of the number of discussions I had over...

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We’ve started the new year with some familiar messages – more preventing future death reports (PFDs) from UK coroners after someone tragically lost their life in circumstances which gave rise to fears that aspects could be repeated and lead to future tragedy. PFDs are statutory notices, something the Coroner issues to an agency who may control aspects of what went wrong or contributed to the outcome. This could be anything from training of staff, to policies and procedures within or across agencies to anything else thought relevant. The organisation in receipt of such a notice has 56days to respond outlining their reaction to the recommendation(s) and these things are usually uploaded to the Office of the Chief Coroner’s website, where the notices are categorised by theme.

I’ve regularly browsed this website for a number of years and this post comes after another recent session – you may find these links useful, if you wish to do the same. These things are tagged in the way that a social media blog would be, so you may...

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I’ve written about the issue of the Mental Health Act and hotel rooms before – focussing on the stated case of ‘Rosso’. I’m not hyperlinking to the old blog post precisely because it is now redundant and out of date – it was written a few years ago, well before the 2017 changes to the Mental Health Act which took effect in December 2018. Forget it – Rosso is now history and has been for a while.  I want to go through how the police now need to think about hotel rooms and the Mental Health Act 1983, specifically sections 135/136 MHA. This post follows the desperately sad inquest in to the death of Dr Deborah Lamont who, the Coroner ruled today, died by suicide in a Cardiff hotel in March 2019.

It will be necessary and relevant to see the full PFD report from the Coroner to answer some of the questions I’m interested in, but a big issue emerges from this inquest in the immediate media coverage and which addresses a question I was asked only yesterday, during the delivery of training in my own force:

Is a hotel...

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This post arises from a specific event, but it’s far from unique.  I want to use it as an example of something so straight-forward and obvious, yet complex and intractable and which raises a number of questions I suspect are often overlooked or set aside.  It relates to the conveyance of patients who have absconded from hospital and then turned up out of area – ie, out of the area of the police force to which they’ve been reported missing.  It’s about the return of AWOL patients (those who are absent without leave under the Mental Health Act 1983) but it allows me to cover a few things I’ve mentioned before, in a new context of a real incident.  So apologies to those who’ve read of some of these things before, but I’m re-painting the Forth Bridge here, as requested!

Last week at work, another police force had re-detained a patient in their area who was missing from a hospital in our area.  When the patient was reported missing to us by the hospital, we had undertaken certain initial enquiries and asked the other...

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