Police officers in England will not reply to considerations about psychological well being if there is no such thing as a danger to life or crime being dedicated.

The authorities says the coverage might save one million hours of police time yearly.

Senior officers say forces have “lost their way” by coping with much less critical mental-health issues.

But mental-health charities say they’re “deeply worried” at what may very well be a “dangerous” change.

The authorities says it’s offering an additional £1bn a yr, together with £150m for amenities to interchange law enforcement officials, together with:

And 999-call handlers are being educated to evaluate a request for officers to attend and determine whether or not:

But Mind chief govt Dr Sarah Hughes mentioned mental-health providers had been “not resourced to step up overnight”.

“Above all, at the heart of any decision like this should be the people that the police serve not the potential hours of work saved,” she mentioned.

The extra funding had been introduced in 2021, the charity mentioned, so there was no new cash to pay for added referrals from the police, at a time of rising demand for mental-health providers.

Having examined the coverage throughout the previous three years, Humberside Police mentioned it had saved a mean of 1,441 hours of police time a month.

Three different forces, Hampshire, Lancashire and South Yorkshire, are additionally beginning to introduce the coverage, to be carried out throughout England inside three years.

In Sheffield, 999-response officer PC April Clark was lately referred to as to a person attempting to throw himself from a first-floor window.

“It is quite literally in my hands,” she mentioned.

“You can’t let them go. You can’t let anything happen to them. You’ve got to do what you can for them and their family until the right help comes along.”

She has additionally handled a younger mom’s suicide.

These are each instances through which officers would nonetheless attend.

But PC Clark mentioned she additionally often dealt with calls from NHS workers and members of the general public “going home for the weekend in their nine-to-five jobs”, asking the police for a ”welfare test” on someone with mental-health issues.

Officers can end up sitting with patients for 12 hours and more in hospitals, because no-one else is available and NHS staff are concerned about the risk to the patient, staff or public.

An early assessment of the impact of the changes in Humberside Police concluded that police turned down requests to carry out welfare checks, or look for patients who had gone “AWOL”. They also handed over the care of patients more quickly to the health service.

This meant more patients were seen by health service staff with appropriate training rather than police officers.

Deputy Chief Constable Rachel Bacon, from the National Police Chiefs’ Council said the new approach would be better for people in mental-health crises who tended to “really feel criminalised” when officers turned up to help them. Some mistakenly believed they were under arrest.

Currently, officers are required by law when someone is detained under the Mental Health Act, allowing them to be taken to a place of safety, possibly against their will.

But the National Police Chiefs’ Council plans to ask the federal government to alter this.