Andrew Wooff

Introduction: Globally, there is demand on police and emergency health services to respond to people in mental distress. Research at this intersect has focused on decriminalisation of people with severe mental health disorders, police custody care or interagency collaborative models. There is little understanding of the experiences of stakeholders where mental distress is not associated with a severe mental disorder or criminal offence. Aim: To determine current knowledge about safeguarding of people in mental distress supported by police and healthcare practitioners. Method: A rigorous integrative review with 10 databases was searched January 2002 to January 2024. Results: The search filtered 12,451 titles and abstracts with 41 full‐text articles appraised. Three overarching themes emerged: Safeguarding and care experiences of people in mental distress; intoxication, self‐harm and aggression; professional perspectives and responses to people in mental distress. Discussion: Experiences are varied. Whilst there is evidence of compassion, many reported negative experiences when self‐harm and intoxication are involved, inconsistent professional responses and gaps in emergency police and mental health systems. Implications for Practice: Unscheduled care and community mental health nurses have a vital role to play in identifying and influencing interdisciplinary gaps in out‐of‐hours emergency health and police processes to support people in mental distress to prevent repetitive distress cycles. This calls for an urgent re‐imagining of unscheduled care mental health pathways, Specifically, where practice gaps impact on people who are intoxicated yet do not require inpatient care. Relevance to Mental Health Nursing (for Peer Reviewers and Editors Only): People in mental distress (PiMD) who come to police attention often require an interdisciplinary response. Unscheduled care and community mental health nurses play a key role in this support. This integrative review suggests there are systems gaps and variety in mental health and policing practice for PiMD, particularly for those who are intoxicated and/or who do not need inpatient care. Some PiMD experience cyclical, and at times, undignified and unsafe care. These gaps should be addressed through service redesign and sharing of evidence across disciplines whilst listening to and responding to perspectives of those experiencing mental distress in our communities.

The Covid-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns presented significant challenges for policing: changing patterns of criminal behaviour, frequently shifting emergency regulations, resourcing pressures, and new dynamics in how police and citizens interacted with each other. However, the impact of the pandemic on volunteers in policing—in England and Wales, a cohort estimated between 7,211 Police Support Volunteers (PSVs) to up to 500,000 ‘citizens in policing’ who regularly give time in some capacity to support the police—has been largely overlooked. This article draws on a national benchmarking survey of PSVs in England and Wales conducted in 2021 (n = 1,305) to reflect on volunteering experiences during the pandemic. It considers the contribution that PSVs can make during challenging times and the importance of flexible and innovative tasking to capitalize on the volunteer offer. The article underpins the centrality of an adequately resourced police volunteer infrastructure to effectively mobilize volunteer resources on both a ‘business as usual’ basis, and during times of crisis.

Police agencies face growing pressure from limited resources and increasingly complex crime patterns. Innovation in public safety is no longer optional, it is imperative. Volunteer policing has long played a vital role in supporting law enforcement. Today, however, it is hindered by declining participation, lack of diversity, and persistent retention challenges. Drawing on decades of collective experience, our international team comprising volunteer officers, police leaders, trainers, professors, researchers, and consultants proposes Policing Together, a community-driven framework. This framework integrates evidence from the 2024 International Symposium on Volunteering in Policing (Edinburgh) and the National Women in the Special Constabulary Conference 2024 (Birmingham), alongside international research and practice. We propose engaging various e groups such as capable and diverse citizens, specialists, employers, organizations and youths, and employing varied methods, including digital platforms, school engagement, and grassroots recruitment, to overcome systemic barriers. Rooted in pragmatist philosophy, Policing Together offers a flexible, inclusive framework that sustains public trust and community resilience.

Purpose: This paper explores the challenging nexus of police custody, risk and intra-organisational boundaries in the context of a recently reformed national police service. Police custody is an often-hidden aspect of policing, away from the public gaze and scrutiny. Although there is increasing recognition of the importance of rural policing (e.g. Harkness (2020); Mawby and Yarwood (2011); Ruddell and Jones (2020); Yarwood and Wooff (2016)), there has been little or no focus on rural police custody. This paper seeks to begin to redress this by focussing on the challenges faced by rural police custody in the context of large-scale organisational change.Design/methodology/approach: This paper draws on data from a study funded by the Scottish Institute for Policing Research (2016–2018), entitled “Measuring Risk and Efficiency in Police Custody in Scotland”. The paper adopts a qualitative methodology to develop an understanding of the varying nature of police custody across Scotland. Two contrasting case study locations were selected, one urban and one rural. 12 semi-structured interviews and 15 hours of observation were carried out. Data was transcribed, coded and analysed and thematic analysis enabled themes to be developed. This paper draws on the data from the rural custody suite.Findings: Drawing on the theoretical framework of Giacomantonio (2014) and more recent considerations of abstract policing Terpstra et al. (2019), this paper offers insights into the ways that police custody in rural Scotland has been organised, against the backdrop of challenging organisational change. I argue that as policing services in Scotland have become increasingly “abstract” from communities, police custody as a national division has witnessed the impact of this more greatly than other parts of local policing. Intra-organisational management around staffing has led to complex management of risk, illustrating some of the challenges of national organisational change on police custody.Originality/value: This paper focuses on the impact of large scale organisational change on rural police custody and intra-organisational relationships and dynamics. Rural policing is still a largely neglected area of study and rural police custody is even less understood. This paper therefore provides an original contribution by focusing on this under-researched area of policing. It also illustrates complexity around risk, staffing and management of people being held in rural police custody suites. It is therefore of value to policing scholars in other contexts, as well as rural criminology more generally. It has applicability to international contexts where macro level policing reform is occurring.

Over the last decade, police custody has seen a resurgence of scholarly interest. This chapter maps the contours of this burgeoning field, critically examining the data collection methods that researchers typically use, including observation, interviews, surveys and secondary analysis of custody records, as well as some of the ethical challenges that arise as a result. It also examines the methodologies underpinning this research, such as ethnography, the mixed-methods research paradigm and appreciative inquiry. The chapter also scopes out innovation in police custody research of the future. Drawing on the allied field of prison studies, we critically examine the potential of creative methodologies, such as photo elicitation, and sensory approaches, which combine visual and aural data collection, to enrich existing understandings of staff and detainee experiences. We conclude that police custody research is in a healthy state, methodologically-speaking, and the future looks bright for scholars seeking to join the field, with this chapter hopefully providing a ‘road map’ for those that do.

Effective cross-service collaboration has been posed as a way of improving outcomes for people, enhancing community safety and well-being, reducing social and health inequalities, and improving service resource efficiencies. However, it was not known what evidence and frameworks existed for service leads to reform collaborative public service responses. This systematic review aimed to summarize evidence to understand best ways for police, fire, and ambulance services to collaborate to improve community safety and well-being. Standard methodology was used following PRISMA guidance. The search strategy optimized report retrieval from a broad range of academic databases, grey literature, and citation handsearching from January 2012 to March 2022. Endnote 8 supported data management. Eligible reports explored collaboration benefits between any two emergency services to improve any aspect of community safety or well-being and had to provide relevant extractable information. Critical appraisal and syntheses of findings were conducted. Studies could originate from any country. Records were screened and retrieved by one author and included reports independently double-screened. From the academic databases, 4,648 reports were identified and screened, of which 25 reports were retrieved and assessed for eligibility, but no relevant studies were retained following full text review. A further 27 records were identified from websites and citation searching, of which three were included following eligibility checks. The scant evidence uncovered in this review tentatively suggests service collaboration initiatives have potential for decreased resource use, increased public confidence, faster responses, increased survival rates, and reduced unnecessary emergency responses. Robust evidence is needed to influence policy and practice.

Appreciative Inquiry is a methodology originating from organisational psychology, though it has since been used in criminal justice research including police studies. It is used to identify the actual and potential strengths of an individual or an institution, with a view to building on these strengths in the future. The primary purpose of this paper is to assess the value of Appreciative Inquiry for police research, where its use is potentially confounded by aspects of police culture. Drawing on an ESRC-funded study, the ‘good’ police custody study, we critically examine the role of Appreciative Inquiry in enabling access and data collection through appreciatively-informed interviews, examining this from the perspective of the police, the policed and police researchers. We also illustrate how Appreciative Inquiry contributed to the theorisation process and to the development of theoretically-informed recommendations and organisational reforms, matters that are neglected in other police and criminal justice research. We conclude that certain aspects of police culture hinder its use, for example, the cynicism of frontline police officers, whilst the storytelling features of police culture and growing collaboration between police and researchers help overcome these barriers. Appreciative Inquiry must still be used reflexively in police research, recognising for example the tendency towards naïve optimism and its impacts on vulnerable participants. Nonetheless, in light of Appreciative Inquiry dovetailing with growing expectations that the police and academics should work more closely together, there are grounds for appreciating Appreciative Inquiry as an important part of a diverse police research agenda in the future.