Police Responses to Mental Health Incidents 2018 to 2024

Publication Number: 1549

 

FOI Number: 20340

Information Request  

 

I would like to know, if possible, how many mental health tagged incidents Essex Police have attended for the previous six years

 

If possible I would like the data to be split between years, so 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and finally 2023. If possible 2024 for as well to date but this is not a necessity.

  

FOI Duty   

First Duty – Essex Police does hold information relating to your request.     

Second Duty – See below.  

Fact – Not applicable.  

Exemption – Not applicable. 

 

Information 

 

Caveat: The information is correct as at 21 June 2024.

 

- Two separate queries were run to collect these results:

• A query to return all STORM Incidents classified as Mental Health Incidents
• A query to return all STORM Incidents with the Mental health Qualifier flag (but not including incidents classified as Mental Health Incidents – to exclude the duplicates classified as Mental Health Incidents and Incidents with the Mental health Qualifier flag)

- Arrived date was also included in the query so that only the attended Incidents were included, as requested. Those with no Arrived Date were excluded.

 

Attended Incidents with Final call Type Description 'MENTAL HEALTH INCIDENT' and attended Incidents with 'MENTAL HEALTH' qualifier between 01/01/2018 and 31/05/2014.

Year	Number of Attended Incidents
2018	4,955
2019	4,952
2020	6,305
2021	7,178
2022	7,608
2023	6,859
2024 (to 31/05/24)	2,241
Grand Total	40,098

 

Every effort is made to ensure that the data provided by Essex Police is accurate and complete. However, Essex Police systems are designed primarily for the management of individual cases and not for the purposes of providing data to answer specific FOI enquiries. Please note although data can be extracted from several sources via database queries, the results may be subject to inaccuracies. Care should be taken to understand our return when considering the interpretation or further use of the data. 

 

 

FOI Number: 20342

Information Request  

 

1. What is the total number of mental health related callouts (CAD records) that the Essex Police have responded to over the last five years? I would like this information to be provided for each of the last five calendar years as follows: 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023.
2. 
   Please could you also provide the proportion of total callouts that relate to mental health incidents (e.g. 40%) in each requested calendar year. If this is not available, please just provide the total number of callouts for all reasons in each requested calendar year.

 

3. How many detentions were made related to mental health incidents in the last five calendar years?

 

FOI Duty 

First Duty – Essex Police holds some of the information relating to your request. 

Second Duty – See below.  

Fact – The data for the above request is not held in a format that allows for all information to be extracted and verified.  

Refusal – Section 17(5) – Exemption – Section 12(1) 

Reasoning – Essex Police are unable to easily extract the data in relation to Q3. To establish how many detentions were made in the last five years would require manually reviewing each call log to see if an arrest was made, and then extract this data manually.

 

Essex Police systems are designed primarily for the management of individual cases and not primarily to produce statistical information. This process would exceed the time and cost limits under the FOIA and would also qualify as the creation of data as the results cannot be processed by means of purely sorting or filtering data sources or running a database query tool. There is no requirement under the act to create data purely to answer FOI requests. Consequently, Essex Police are exempt from the duty to provide information you have requested under Section 12(1) of the FOIA. 

  

Assisting Outside of the FOI Act  

 

Although excess cost removes the force’s obligations under the FOI Act, as a gesture of goodwill, Essex Police can provide an answer for questions 1 & 2.

 

Caveat: The information is correct as at 21 June 2024.

 

Please note the following:

- A query was done on all incidents with saved dates from 2019 to 2023.

- Final Call Type Description and Arrived Date were included in the results.

- A pivot table was created to break down the results in to either ‘Mental Health Incident’ or ‘Other Incident’ with a filter on only attended incidents as requested (Incidents with Arrived Dates).

- The results were broken down by Year and whether or not the Incident is a Mental health Incident (in Final Call Type Description). Then, the proportion of incidents classed as Mental health Incidents compared to all incidents was calculated to answer Question 2.

 

Year	Mental Health attended Incidents	Other attended Incidents	Total number of attended incidents	Proportion of Mental Health attended Incidents
2019	1,311	183,826	185,137	0.70%
2020	1,861	192,419	194,280	0.96%
2021	1,970	198,547	200,517	0.98%
2022	2,588	182,501	185,089	1.40%
2023	2,032	179,046	181,078	1.12%
Total	9,762	936,339	946,101	1.03%

 

Every effort is made to ensure that the data provided by Essex Police is accurate and complete. However, Essex Police systems are designed primarily for the management of individual cases and not for the purposes of providing data to answer specific FOI enquiries. Please note although data can be extracted from several sources via database queries, the results may be subject to inaccuracies. Care should be taken to understand our return when considering the interpretation or further use of the data.