Mental health-related police incidents: Results of a national census exercise in England and Wales.

While incidents relating to mental state problems do consume police resources, they do not represent disproportionate demand in terms of numbers or time spent. That said, only about a quarter of the police work recorded was related to possible crimes, and the possibility of conflating perception of wider social need with mental state problems may further account for an apparent mismatch between the perceived and actual proportion of the workload spent on these incidents.