Officer Mental Health (45A/21)
Request
This is a request for information under the Freedom of Information Act. My request relates to how the mental health of your police officers is managed. Specifically, I would like the following information:
- How many police officers have taken leave (of any length) due to anxiety, depression, PTSD, stress, or any other identified mental health condition. I would like these statistics broken down by month, between the period March 1st 2020 and today’s date. If data has not been collected up to and including today’s date, please provide me with data between the period March 1st 2020, and the latest date available.
- A description of internal procedures the police force has in place in order to help and support police officers suffering from mental health conditions.
- A description of any changes to internal procedures that the police force has made in order to help and support police officers suffering from mental health conditions since March 1st, 2020.
Response
Please find attached our response.
Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that these data have been extracted from a number of data sources used by forces for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system. As a consequence, care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are taken into account when interpreting those data.
The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of relevance of data to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures for ad hoc requests may have limitations and this should be taken into account when those data are used.
If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data we would ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies, or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.