Co-responding police-mental health programmes: Service user experiences and outcomes in a large urban centre

As police officers are often the first responders to mental health crises, a number of approaches have emerged to support skilled police crisis responses. One such approach is the police-mental health co-responding team model, whereby mental health nurses and police officers jointly respond to mental health crises in the community. In the present mixed-method study, we evaluated outcomes of co-responding team interactions at a large Canadian urban centre by analysing administrative data for 2743 such interactions, and where comparison data were available, compared them to 16 226 police-only team responses. To understand service user experiences, we recruited 15 service users for in-depth qualitative interviews, and completed inductive thematic analysis. Co-responding team interactions had low rates of injury and arrest, and compared to police-only teams, co-responding teams had higher overall rates of escorts to hospital, but lower rates of involuntary escorts. Co-responding teams also spent less time on hospital handovers than police-only teams. Service users valued responders with mental health knowledge and verbal de-escalation skills, as well as a compassionate, empowering, and non-criminalizing approach. Current findings suggest that co-responding teams could be a useful component of existing crisis-response systems.