Open Forum

Do not believe anything police say publicly, especially anything to do with mental health.

Police are trained in mental health, in particular in how to weaponise it to their advantage.  That is, they happily use mental health as an excuse to antagonise and provoke someone so that they have a "threat" that they can then deal with.

They recruit family members and mental health support workers into this corrupt activity, of course, so that they are shielded from any liability.  And they make it impossible to achieve any kind of redress, because they corruptly control the complaints channels, lawyers and courts.

At this point I am confident that it must be an open secret in mental health circles that the system is completely rigged like this.

Any talk about how police deal with mental health situations is just intended to preserve the public fiction that police are under-resourced, bumbling nincompoops just doing their best to keep people safe, when in fact they are very well-resourced, highly trained and experienced, and will find and exploit any opportunity to gain an advantage.

The long-awaited internal NSW Police review into the role of police in mental health response was published on Thursday September 12th 2024.

That the police don't want to attend to most mental health distress call outs is a positive. They acknowledge what we have been saying for a long time, that police presence can often escalate the situation leading to worse outcomes.

However, it's not positive that they seem to be washing their hands of the need to have proper mental health training. Police will still be required to responded to incidents where there is a risk of lose of life, for example when an individual may be wielding a weapon. How much MORE important is it for the police to have comprehensive mental health training in these situations.