A quite startling claim here, that some vast proportion of police time is used in dealing with nutters having a public spasm rather than what we might prefer them to be doing, nicking crims. Perhaps that care in the community idea might be worth revisiting?
Police are spending at least 40 per cent of their time dealing with people with mental ill health rather than fighting crime, the Police Federation has warned.
John Apter, the Federation’s chairman, said police were now devoting 80 per cent of their time to non-crime related incidents, the “lion’s share” of which were because of a mental health crisis.
Police figures showed the number of mental health incidents where police were called had risen by 28 per cent in four years from 385,206 in 2018 to 494,195 last year.
That equated to 1,353 incidents a day – or 56 an hour, according to the data supplied by police forces in England and Wales after Freedom of Information requests.
Park those numbers just for a moment.
“This country is in the grip of a growing mental health crisis and my colleagues are at the very forefront of trying to protect and support vulnerable people,” said Mr Apter.
“These figures show we have reached beyond tipping point, and we would welcome a wider public investigation into these important issues.”
Personally I doubt it. I would need very strong proof indeed to convince me that we’ve more nutters than we used to. Even with wider definitions in use these days – or perhaps narrower, we used to think that wanting bits lopped off was a mental problem – the intuition is that we’re dealing with the problem differently and possibly worse.
But back to our numbers.
40% of police time is spent upon the nutters. 56 incidents an hour is 40% of police time.
One more number, there are 123,171 police in the country.
Hmm.
Each police officer manages to deal with – on average of course – 3.81 nutters a year. And that takes 40% of their time. Thus each police officer, on average, manages to attend to 9.52 incidents a year.
Hmm.
Might the problem be the efficiency with which the police attend to matters rather than the number of nutters they have to attend to?
80% of their time outside of looking out the window of the cop shop, scratching their arse, checking for mis-gendering on the Internet and eating doughnuts would be about right.
Used to be that the nutters were locked away in an asylum. Then some busybodies decided that it was against their human rights, opening the doors. Now they are free to sleep and shit on the streets. Just another alternative lifestyle for those on the left.
As Thomas Szasz said, a brain can be diseased but a mind cannot be ill. In fact, this is a wave of MISBEHAVIOR, which gets you free stuff, and especially attention. Misbehavior (especially excuse-making) is actively catered to, up and down the political system, but most intractably by affluent voters making a statement about themselves by voting for candidates who pander to fluffy mixtures like “LGBTQ” or “homeless” or “Dreamers” or “legacy of slavery.” This must be a greater cause than the gradual loss of efficiency of the police.
I would suggest that if you did an entire sweep of the criminal justice system, the vast majority of the people who swill about within it are mentally ill in some way. The crime they get involved in is as a result of their illnesses (or perhaps it would be better to describe it as their genetic tendencies towards criminal and self harming behaviour) – drink and and drugs being common self medication behaviours, that then end up in criminal behaviour. So I can quite well believe these stats. A friend works in the probation service and she’s of the… Read more »
Guess you didn’t read my earlier post. You refer to “mental illness” but each time you actually describe it, you are describing misbehavior. (I offer no opinion on “genetic tendencies.”) Misbehavior is greatly influenced by other people’s reactions to it; that is, whether the misbehaver thinks he will get away with it or even profit from it. Very often, their “decision-making processes” are not screwed up, all things considered. PS – “Self-medication” leading to criminality is totally an effect of Prohibition.
Bring back the lash, maybe?
Stock so all the local community can get involved.