Detentions by Ethnicity under Mental Health Act 2019-2020
Keywords
Detentions, Ethnicity, Mental, Health, Perceived, Vehicle, Place, Safety, Transport, Ambulance, Station, A&E, Home, Hours, Stay, Arrested, Committing, Offence, Behaviour, Risk, Injury, White, Black, Asian, Mixed, Chinese.
Publication Number
PUB 1445
FOI Reference Number
15883
Request Title
Detentions by Ethnicity under Mental Health Act 2019-2020
Date Range
2019 to 2020
Information Requested
I am writing to make a request under the Freedom of Information Act for data on people detained by the force under the Mental Health Act.
For the 2019-20 and the 2020-21 financial years, please tell me:
1) The number of people detained under the Mental Health Act, broken down by officer-perceived ethnicity
2) The type of vehicle officers used to transport those detained to a place of safety, broken down by officer-perceived ethnicity. Please split these by ambulance, police vehicle, other health vehicle, other, not known, or none (already at a place of safety).
3) The place of safety used for those detained, broken down by officer-perceived ethnicity. Please split these by police station, A&E, private home, health based place of safety, other, and not known.
4) For those people transported using a police vehicle, please specify whether an ambulance was requested, broken down by officer perceived ethnicity.
5) For those people detained and taken to a police station, please specify the reason for the police station being used, broken down by officer perceived ethnicity. For instance in England, officers may take a person to a police station as a place of safety if they are over 18 and their behaviour poses an imminent risk of serious injury or death to that person or others (abbreviated in Home Office data as 'conditions in Regulations were met').
6) For those people detained and taken to a police station, please provide a breakdown of their officer perceived ethnicity and the duration in hours of their stay in the police station.
7) For those people detained and taken to a police station, please provide a count of those who were arrested for committing an offence, broken down by officer perceived ethnicity.
For all ethnicity breakdowns, please use Home Office/ONS categorisations. These consist of 'White', 'Black', 'Asian', 'Mixed', and 'Other'. Please include Chinese persons in the category of Other.
Disclosure with Exemptions
Full Refusal with Section 12 Exemption
Information Correct as at
19 May 2022
Date of Disclosure
24 May 2022
Related Documents/Links
FOI 15883 Response
Having completed enquiries within Essex Police in respect of Section 1(1)(a), Essex Police does hold information relating to your request, however, the obligation of Section 1(1)(b) cannot be met as Essex Police does not hold all the information requested in a format that allows it to be retrieved within the time and cost limits of FOI.
When responding to a request for information under the terms of the FOIA, a public authority is not obliged to provide information if the authority estimates that the cost of the retrieval of the information requested would be in excess of £450 (equivalent to 18 hours work). The costs criteria relates to a request in its entirety, which means that if we cannot retrieve all of the information requested within the costs limit, we are not obliged to retrieve any of the information requested.
Section 12(1) of the FOIA states that a public authority is not obliged to:
“…comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit.”
The following explanation outlines the difficulty Essex Police has in answering your request:
Essex Police are unable to accurately extract the level of detail in relation to your request for the requested periods from our current systems. Essex Police systems are designed primarily for the management of individual cases and not primarily for the production of statistical information for FOI responses. Essex Police no longer take people into custody under Section 136 of the Mental Health Act. As a result of this we are now recording Section 136 as an Investigation Type and due to process changes over the last few years we can only supply volumes of people by ethnicity. This request would entail manually reviewing each investigation one by one to establish the information if held. To establish if information is held would, therefore, exceed the time and cost limits under the FOIA and would 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, and to this extent, Essex Police are exempt from the duty to provide information you have requested under the provisions of Section 12(1) of the FOIA. Therefore, and in accordance with Section 17(1) of the FOIA, this communication must act as a refusal notice to provide all of the information that could be interpreted as being captured by this part of your request.
Having said that and in an effort to assist, although excess cost removes the force’s obligations under the FOIA, Essex Police can confirm the following:
Caveats:
The data is correct as at 19 May 2022.
Please note that Essex Police no longer take people into custody under Section 136 of the Mental Health Act. As a result of this we are now recording Section 136 as an Investigation Type and due to process changes over the last few years we can only supply volumes of people by ethnicity. The data provided is, therefore, Section 136 Detention Investigations recorded.
The below table represents Self Defined Ethnicity.
|
|
2019/2020 |
2020/2021 |
|
African |
6 |
3 |
|
Any Other Asian Background |
10 |
2 |
|
Any Other Black Background |
4 |
6 |
|
Any Other Ethnic Group |
5 |
2 |
|
Any Other Mixed Background |
4 |
2 |
|
Any Other White Background |
13 |
9 |
|
Bangladeshi |
1 |
|
|
Caribbean |
1 |
1 |
|
Indian |
3 |
|
|
Not stated |
4 |
13 |
|
Pakistani |
1 |
|
|
White And Asian |
1 |
1 |
|
White And Black Caribbean |
2 |
2 |
|
White British |
512 |
475 |
|
White Irish |
1 |
5 |
|
Unknown/Not Specified/Blank |
106 |
99 |
|
Sum: |
674 |
620 |
The below table represents Ethnic Appearance.
|
|
2019/2020 |
2020/2021 |
|
Asian |
21 |
5 |
|
Black |
16 |
22 |
|
Chinese, Japanese or South East Asian |
1 |
1 |
|
Middle Eastern |
4 |
|
|
Unknown |
5 |
10 |
|
White - North European |
580 |
552 |
|
White - South European |
15 |
8 |
|
Unknown/Not Specified/Blank |
32 |
22 |
|
Sum: |
674 |
620 |
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 Force Information Management Board chaired by the Deputy Chief Constable has oversight of the Force wide programme of work to improve the quality of Force data. This work has identified data quality leads in all key areas of the business including the Crime and Public Protection Command. Liaison between the Force Data Quality Team and the Crime and Public Protection Command lead for data quality will identify and resolve issues through a variety of mechanisms to ensure regular and appropriate supervisory oversight.
You may also find the below links of interest:
Mental Health Act 1983 (legislation.gov.uk)
How to access mental health services - NHS (www.nhs.uk)
Mental health – detention | College of Policing