“We’re not the right people to deal with it”: How policing the pandemic revealed significant inadequacies in UK mental health provision

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a variety of responses. While many UK public agencies were encouraged to close their doors, police officers continued to work enforcing the rapidly changing government restrictions and first responding to emergency incidents. One pre-existing responsibility was responding to people in mental health crisis; an area both fraught with complexity and where the police are often thought ill-equipped to handle (Trebilcock & Weston, 2019). Drawing on interviews with frontline police officers and other related personnel, this chapter exposes the inadequacy of mental health provision in the UK. While documenting how the police became the service of first and last resort for mental health by both agencies and service users long before the pandemic, we also illustrate how the Covid restrictions placed on officers exposed the extent of work they do with people presenting with mental ill health. To conclude, the chapter considers how the policing pandemic response to mental health offers contemporary and new challenges to the level of police involvement in this contested and complex area.