What's happened
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has written to health and social care services in Greater London to inform them of the plan.
Why it matters
The move is designed to free up officers to fight crime, as Rowley claimed that more than 10,000 hours of police time a month was spent dealing with mental health crises. However, campaigners have expressed concern about the Met's plan to step away from crisis calls.
What the papers say
The Guardian, The Times, BBC News, The Independent, The Mirror
How we got here
Police forces across Great Britain have seen a significant rise in the number of mental health incidents they have dealt with in the past five years. Officers in England and Wales spend nearly one million hours a year in A&E with mental health patients awaiting assessment, according to a productivity review by the National Police Chiefs’ Council.
More on these topics
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Sir Mark Peter Rowley, QPM is a British retired senior police officer. He was the Assistant Commissioner for Specialist Operations of the Metropolitan Police Service and the concurrent Chair of the National Police Chiefs' Council Counter-Terrorism 2Coordi
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The Metropolitan Police Service, formerly and still commonly known as the Metropolitan Police and informally as the Met, Scotland Yard, or the Yard, is the territorial police force responsible for law enforcement in the Metropolitan Police District, which
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The Guardian is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as The Manchester Guardian, and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers The Observer and The Guardian Weekly, The Guardian is part of the Guardian Media Group, owned by the S
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The Metropolitan Police Service, formerly and still commonly known as the Metropolitan Police and informally as the Met, Scotland Yard, or the Yard, is the territorial police force responsible for law enforcement in the Metropolitan Police District, which