Numbers of Mental Health Flagged Incidents by Year 2014 to 2024

Publication Number: 1586

FOI Number: 22043

Information Request

Can you provide annual data (calendar) from 2014-2024, for police contacts logged as 'Mental Health', categorised by age and gender.

Further Clarification

i mean the number of 999 and 101 calls to you which were flagged as mental health incidents.

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

Second Duty – See below  

Fact - It is not possible to extract and verify all the data in your request  

Exemption - Section 12(1)  

Refusal - Section 17(5) of FOIA  

Reasoning – Essex Police are unable to provide a comprehensive data report to meet this request as the data is not available in a readily extractable format, nor is it held on a central log. 

With regard to your question, Essex Police is unable to provide data on the numbers of mental health flagged incidents broken down by the age or gender of the persons reported as this information cannot be accurately extracted from our incident recording system. To attempt to answer this question would require manually reviewing each mental health flagged incident recorded in the desired time frame to ascertain what age and gender information was recorded, extracting any relevant information found and collating it into a bespoke report.

To establish if information is held would, therefore, exceed the time and cost limits under the FOIA and would additionally 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. 

When refusing a request on cost (Section 12(1)/12(2)), outside of the act and in effort to assist we can provide the following 

To address your question, Essex Police can however provide the following data on the numbers of recorded mental health flagged incidents by year:

Caveat: The data is correct as at 17 June 2025

Notes

- The data has been extracted from the STORM incident recording system, based on the final call types 'Mental Health' or any call type starting with RCRP (Right Care Right Person).

- There are likely to be other incidents whereby mental health was a factor, but these incidents were primarily for mental health.

- The increase in incidents in 2024 may be due to changes in recording. For example, a call may previously have been categorised as 'concern for welfare', but is now categorised as 'RCRP'.

Numbers of Mental Health Flagged Incidents by Year – 2014 to 2024

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 a number of 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.

The following articles available via our publication scheme may be of interest:

Published Items - Mental Health | Essex Police