THERE AND BACK AGAIN: what I learnt in the wide world of policing

Sergeant Glen Blackwell joined the Global Law Enforcement and Public Health Association to gain insight into how other agencies in the world are implementing strategies and programs to better interact with people suffering from behavioural health crisis.

He joined the association after taking up a position at the WA Police Force Mental Health Co Response Unit and realised the best way to investigate these strategies would be to see it on the ground in action. This led him to successfully applying for and being granted a Winston Churchill Trust Fellowship.

After spending three months overseas working alongside several police and government agencies, Sergeant Glen Blackwell has published a report of his recommendations and strategies to implement so police officers are better equipped with responding to behavioural health crisis.

“Police have these high utilisers who are consistently engaging emergency services, so we think to ourselves ok how do we as police traditionally deal with recidivism? I was looking at how we break the cycle, but what I learnt from going away is that it’s very much a bigger picture than that. This is a societal issue which needs a societal answer,” he said.

Canada

First on the itinerary was a stop in Vancouver where Glen spent one week engaging with the Vancouver Police and Vancouver Coastal Health Departments.

“Vancouver was one of the first in the world to introduce a policing Co-Response model in 1978, similar to the one we have now in WA that was rolled out in a trial in 2016,” he said.

“They then expanded to having an Assertive Outreach Team (AOT) and Assertive Community Treatment Team which are proactive models identifying their high utilisers.”

Glen said both teams operate with a multi-agency approach between police and health.

AOT is designed to focus on the top 25-30 High Utilisers who are high risk of harm and treatment resistant in an intensive approach to stabilise over a period of up to 3 months. Most of the consumers in this group have been through the judicial system for serious offences and their mental capacity has played a part in their offending.