Measuring the trend in police tasks concerning people with mental health challenges in Denmark, 2008–2022

Abstract

The handling of people with acute mental health challenges has become a defining police task over the recent decades but data challenges limit the investigation of the nature of this trend. To get as close to police-citizen interactions as possible with quantitative data, we automate the information kept in more than 3 million descriptions of encounters between police and citizens of Denmark during 2008–2022, obtained from the administrative system at the Danish National Police. The resulting data allows us to estimate trends in these encounters and split them by whether the involved citizen was likely in acute need of mental health assistance. We validate the data from our automation against estimates obtained from detailed analyses of more than 19,200 incident descriptions covering 2009–2016. Results confirm a strong upward trend in police tasks related to the handling of people recorded as having acute mental health challenges, far exceeding other relevant trends in the data; an upward trend across all case types.