What seems to be the problem officer? An exploratory study of governing practices during the implementation of mental health triage

Worldwide, the police have become a routine and potentially restrictive, criminalising
response to those experiencing mental health crisis in the community. Co-response
programmes have been widely implemented to address this; in England and Wales
these programmes are known as mental health triage. Mental health triage is a
mechanism to facilitate the collaboration of police and mental health professional(s),
where the police are advised and supported in their decision making processes. This
research places a critical focus on two mental health triage sites in a northern police
force, situating the analysis in debates around the management of those who
experience mental health crisis, in the context of the lack of parity of funding for and
access to community mental health services. Indeed, little is known about the
contextual ground-level practices of mental health triage in the care and control of
mental health crisis, or the normative and ethical issues at play, as research has
focused more broadly on effectiveness and stakeholder perspectives on the barriers
and facilitators of implementation. As such, this research aims to explore the
practices of mental health triage, using a governmental lens to explicate how care
and control manifest at the street level police-mental health nexus. An ethnographic
approach was utilised to facilitate a contextually sensitive and theoretically informed
analysis of the “how” of governing in the chosen study sites. The findings of this work
present an account of the nuances of governance that shape different components
of the mental health triage process. In so doing, this illuminates the relational and
negotiated nature of mental health triage and the importance of the locality and the
people in it when mediating national and local crisis care policy, which has
significance for future research, policy and practice.