When the question is posed for how we can improve policing and outcomes for people needing mental health support, often the policy response is – more training.
How effective is this approach and is it showing any real impact? To critically assess this we have asked Dr Matthew Morgan, Lecturer in Criminology and Criminal Justice at the Australia Catholic University about his field study on policing training and why “culture eats training for breakfast.”
Why has policy primarily focused on further mental health training for police?
In recent years, police de-escalation training has been widely endorsed in public policy debates as a means of peacefully managing encounters with individuals experiencing psychological distress. This discourse has been largely driven by the reality that police in Australia – and in most Western contexts – are significantly more likely to use force, including fatal force, against individuals in mental health crises than against other members of the public. This issue is further compounded by the disproportionate amount of time police spend responding to highly vulnerable individuals experiencing psychological distress.
How effective is further police training around mental health?
Despite advancements in evaluation research, we still know little about the long-term effectiveness of police training of any kind. What we do know is that in-depth police training for responding to such complex situations is often lacking. Egon Bittner highlighted this deficit in his foundational 1967 research on police responses to individuals with mental illness in the United States, arguing that police officers relied on intuition and discretion to resolve community mental health incidents. Certainly, in the ten years I have been researching this issue in both the United Kingdom and Australia, little appears to have changed.
There is an inherent problem in dispatching an armed, uniformed response to a mental health crisis, which begs the question: why are police often first responders to such situations? The answer to this question extends far beyond policing and reflects a broader societal narrative about the stigma of mental illness and its entanglement with neoliberal politics. Put simply, it’s far cheaper to send police than to invest in a robust, proactive, and responsive community mental health system. While Australia enjoys one of the world’s best health care systems for physical health, mental illness remains heavily stigmatised and chronically under-resourced.
Will improving mental health response training alone create better responses?
This issue raises another fundamental question: can – and should – police be adequately trained to respond ethically to such crises? Answering this is more challenging, given the conflicting philosophies that shape Australian police agencies: the paramilitary model versus the community-oriented model. I recall, during my fieldwork in 2018, watching police recruits march in formation before class on a parade ground. I couldn’t help but wonder how such regimented, militaristic displays align with the core role of policing – building communication and trust with the public. While many officers successfully de-escalate community mental health crises, the reality is that Australian policing is not designed to replace a grossly underfunded mental health system. Improving mental health response training alone is unlikely to solve the issue, as long as police culture continues to be rooted in a paramilitary, ‘crime-fighting’ mentality. As one officer put it, “culture eats training for breakfast.”
Who should respond to people experiencing mental health distress?
To answer this, we must first consider what a mental health crisis entails, in order to determine which service is best equipped to provide an appropriate care. While there is no inherent link between mental illness and violence, individuals in acute psychiatric distress can, at times, pose a risk to themselves or others. In some cases, they may be armed – often with an edged weapon – either in a defensive or self-harming context. These are the kinds of incidents that frequently appear in police fatality statistics. According to the Australian Institute of Criminology, 85% of police-related fatalities involving individuals in psychiatric distress involved someone armed with a potentially deadly weapon. Australian police are trained to respond to such threats with force and are specifically instructed to draw their firearms when confronted with an edged weapon.
This default to high-end use of force is likely to undermine the effectiveness of tactical de-escalation strategies. Many individuals with mental illness are already deeply mistrustful of police – often due to prior negative encounters or vicarious experiences. In this context, the uniform itself, complete with visible weaponry, is unlikely to convey peaceful intentions – especially to someone in acute crisis. Coronial reports into police-related fatalities often reveal that the presence of police further escalated a person’s mental health crisis, leading to behaviour perceived as threatening, which officers then responded to with deadly force – as directed by their training protocols.
We need to try something different. Currently the people most at risk of harm or fatality are those who should be receiving a first response rooted in care and de-escalation. There are other first responders who can provide a less criminalising and stigmatising approach to mental health crises – such as Crisis Assessment Treatment Teams (CATT), which are comprised of mental health professionals. Research from lived experience perspectives consistently demonstrates the effectiveness of such alternative models in delivering empathetic, trauma-informed care to individuals in psychiatric distress. However, unlike police, these teams are not always available to respond around the clock to emergency mental health situations.
Why do you support the Alternative First Responders campaign?
While alternative therapeutic models continue to show promising outcomes for individuals experiencing mental health crises, they are often under-resourced and unavailable in many areas – resulting in a continued reliance on police-only responses. This is why I support the National Justice Project’s Alternative First Responders campaign, which advocates for increased government funding to support health-based, trauma-informed first responder models. Despite their demonstrated effectiveness, health-based mental health responder models often receive only short-term pilot funding, limiting their ability to expand geographically and operate 24/7. Sustained government investment is essential to ensure these initiatives become the norm – not the exception – and to reduce reliance on police-only responses that too often result in the criminalisation and harm of some of society’s most vulnerable individuals.
We thank Dr Matthew Morgan for his insights and that we need to think beyond police training when we seek for better outcomes for our communities. His insights helped shape our position paper which you can read here. We need to have the right skills by the right people in providing the right first response.
You can read more of Dr Morgan’s work here:
- Morgan, M. (2025). Perceptions of Police Treatment from Young Persons with Mental Illness: Findings from the Australian Youth Safety Survey. Applied Police Briefings, 1(3), 35–37.
- Dodd, S., Morgan, M., Weir, B., & Bowyer, J. (2024). Police Use of Force in Mental Health Crises: An Analysis of Coronial Inquest Findings from Australia. International Journal of Crime, Justice, and Social Democracy. https://doi.org/10.5204/ijcjsd.3560
- Morgan, M. (2024). ‘The response hasn’t been a human-to-human response, but a system to human response’: Health care perspectives of police responses to persons with mental illness in crisis. Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11896-024-09649-y
- Morgan, M. (2022). Contradictions Between Community‐Oriented Police Training and Paramilitary Police Training: Implications for Police Recruit Mental Health Response Training. The Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology, 37(4), 876–891. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11896-022-09537-3
