The head of the Police Association and a mental health advocate are calling for a successful mental health response partnership between the police, ambulance and the DHB in Wellington to be rolled out wider.
The partnership, which ran for a year, saw a police officer, paramedic and mental health clinician attend emergency mental health callouts in the same vehicle.
A "first of its kind" in New Zealand, the co-response team saw a reduction in the number of people being taken straight to a police station or emergency department.
Calls for the partnership to continue in Wellington and nationally come after figures obtained by 1News under the Official Information Act show an 87% jump in the number of calls to police for threatened or attempted suicides in the past six years.
READ MORE: Exclusive: Mental health distress calls to police on the rise
There was also a 66% rise in the number of mental health-related calls, but police were only able to respond to less than half of these.
Mental health advocate Brooke Lacey said the police are "at a point of crisis" in dealing with mental health distress calls.
She said people in mental distress aren't getting the help they deserve when the police have to cancel the calls as crime rates go up.
Police are not trained mental health professionals, Lacey said, so shouldn't be showing up alone to try and help people in mental health distress.
She said it was "disheartening" for people for officers to show up when one is "in the worst state of your life". Lacey added going to a hospital or a cell was "just not OK".
"We want people to get better and that's not a therapeutic way."
Lacey said an alternative to officers responding to these calls is a co-response team like the pilot in Wellington. She explained it is about agencies coming together to create change and said ambulance and mental health workers are needed on the frontline.
She said the co-response team could be rolled out nationwide to "act now" on mental health distress.
Lacey submitted a petition two years ago calling for better crisis support within the mental health system.
In its response in December last year, the Health Committee said it was pleased to hear about the work to pilot a mental health co-response team.
"If the findings of this evaluation are positive, we would encourage the ministry to consider how this model might be resourced and rolled out in other parts of the country, with a view to addressing many of the issues the petitioner has raised," it noted.
"In the meantime, some of us think that further investment should be made to urgently roll out a co-response service across the country."
Police Association president Chris Cahill said Lacey had "hit the nail on the head".
"These people have mental distress. It's a health issue. It's not a law and order issue," he said.
"While police are clearly going to have to respond to people who are at immediate risk of harm, they're not the right people to help these people long-term or even when they're in mental distress.
"The choice is they take them to the police station, which isn't appropriate as they haven't broke the law most of the time, or they take them to an ED department..."
Cahill said the co-response team "is the answer" as it had a "much better response". He explained the team was more quicker, accurate and it had had "clearly better outcomes".
"The police – we'll be there to help people if they need assistance but it isn't the answer for these people. In fact, often it can make it worse."
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