The quiet unwinding — how New Zealand’s plan to pull police out of mental health call-outs stalled
The fourth and final phase of the Mental Health Response Change Programme has been delayed indefinitely. A mental health worker has been assaulted. Three emergency calls went unanswered. The police watchdog has refused to investigate. Eighteen months in, the programme that was meant to free up officers and deliver better care is being held together by a series of pauses no one is willing to call a retreat.
When then-Police Commissioner Andrew Coster stood up in late 2024 to announce that police would begin pulling back from mental health call-outs, the case sounded reasonable. Officers were spending too many hours sitting in emergency departments with people in crisis. The work, he said, was not what police were trained for and not what communities expected of them. A four-phase plan would gradually shift that responsibility to health services, freeing up frontline staff for the work only they could do.
Phase one began in November 2024. Phase two rolled out across the country between April and June 2025. Phase three, which raised the threshold for non-emergency mental health requests, was implemented last November. Phase four — the most consequential of the lot, including a hard 15-minute cap on emergency department handovers and the removal of routine welfare checks — was supposed to follow in the first half of this year.
It hasn’t.
On 28 April, Police Assistant Commissioner Tusha Penny confirmed phase four had been delayed, with no new date and no new details. “The aim is to progress to phase four as soon as it is safe to do so,” she said in a statement. The wording matters. After eighteen months of insistence that the changes were both necessary and well-managed, “as soon as it is safe to do so” is the closest police have come to admitting that, in some quarters, it currently isn’t.
What the workers were saying
The Public Service Association, which represents many of the mental health workers most directly affected by the changes, has been raising the alarm for over a year. A PSA survey of mental health workers found 91 per cent believed the changes would increase safety risks for staff and patients. The union’s national secretary Fleur Fitzsimons has now used the delay to call for a wider rethink.
“It should never have come to this,” Fitzsimons said. “We warned Police, Health NZ, and the Government repeatedly that withdrawing support would put workers and patients in danger. They ignored those warnings and people got hurt.”
The reference to people getting hurt is not rhetorical. In November last year, the same month phase three was rolled out, a mental health worker was assaulted. According to the PSA, the worker made three emergency calls during the incident. None were answered.
The PSA filed a complaint with the Independent Police Conduct Authority (IPCA) and asked the watchdog to review the entire programme. The IPCA declined, citing a lack of resources. Fitzsimons described that response as “not good enough.”
Mental health nurse Helen Garrick, speaking as a New Zealand Nurses Organisation delegate, said health workers had repeatedly raised the same concerns through internal channels and felt unheard. Rotorua emergency department nurse Lyn Logan described the situation in EDs more bluntly: “We’re obviously worried, with the cauldron — we’ve got an ED with under-resourcing to both ED nurses and doctors and mental health nurses.”
Dr Michael Connelly, chair of the New Zealand branch of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine, said his concerns about a blanket 15-minute handover rule have always centred on the highest-risk patients. “The worst case scenario is that someone within the ED, their staff or other patients or family members are injured or worse,” he said. He welcomed the delay as evidence that police were finally listening.
The data problem at the heart of it
One of the more striking admissions in the police statement was that they cannot reliably measure how long their officers are currently spending in emergency departments. Superintendent Bronwyn Marshall said the data was “complex and difficult to quantify.”
That is a remarkable acknowledgement to come eighteen months into a programme whose entire premise is reducing the time officers spend in EDs.
The PSA has seized on this. If police cannot measure how long they are spending with people in distress, Fitzsimons argues, they cannot reliably assess whether each phase has worked before moving to the next one. The decision to delay phase four because the data is not good enough is, in her framing, an indirect admission that the rollout of the earlier phases proceeded on equally thin evidence.
That argument deserves to be taken seriously. The Mental Health Response Change Programme was not a small adjustment. It was a structural redrawing of the boundary between two of the most overstretched parts of the New Zealand state. A redrawing that proceeded, by police’s own account, without a reliable way of measuring its central performance metric.
What was supposed to happen in phase four
The fourth phase was the one with the sharpest edges. Two changes in particular drew the most concern from health workers.
The first was the 15-minute handover rule. Under phase two, police were required to wait with people detained under the Mental Health Act for up to 60 minutes before handing over to health staff. Phase four was to cut that to 15 minutes. For an emergency department already operating, in Logan’s words, as a cauldron of under-resourcing, a 15-minute window in which a high-risk patient could be left in the care of staff with no security backup was the source of acute anxiety.
The second was the planned removal of police obligation to do welfare checks where there was no risk of criminality, life or safety. On paper, that wording sounds tightly bounded. In practice, it would have shifted a category of work that often falls in a grey zone — checking on someone reported missing from a mental health facility, for instance — entirely off police books. Where it would have shifted to is, eighteen months in, still not entirely clear.
Last year’s Budget allocated $28 million for ten mental health teams to respond to mental distress calls alongside law enforcement. The first four regions to receive that support were announced earlier this year. Whether ten teams across a country of five million is enough to absorb the work police are walking away from is the question no one in government has answered with anything approaching specificity.
A familiar pattern of phased reform
Anyone who has followed New Zealand health and justice policy over the past decade will recognise the shape of what is happening here. A government identifies a genuine problem — in this case, police time consumed by mental health work that arguably belongs elsewhere. It commits to a phased reform. The early phases are relatively uncontroversial. The later phases, which contain the actual structural change, run into the reality that the system on the receiving end of the change does not have the capacity to absorb it.
At that point, one of two things tends to happen. Either the reform is quietly paused, with the earlier phases left in place — meaning the system has shifted some way toward the new model but has not completed the transition, with all the gaps that creates. Or the reform is reversed, often with no formal announcement, and the resources allocated to it disappear into the general pool.
It is too early to say which path the Mental Health Response Change Programme is on. But the indefinite delay of phase four, the IPCA’s refusal to review the programme, the police’s own admission that they cannot measure ED time reliably, and the assault on a worker whose emergency calls went unanswered all point to a programme that has reached the limit of what its current architecture can deliver.
The political dimension nobody is talking about
This is an election year. National campaigned in 2023 on a tougher line on crime and a promise to put police back on the beat. Reducing police time on mental health call-outs was, in that framing, an obvious win — a way of freeing up officers without recruiting more of them. Police Commissioner Richard Chambers, who replaced Coster, has spoken publicly about a “wave of crime” arriving in New Zealand and the need for a culture reset.
The political incentive to press ahead with the withdrawal from mental health is therefore considerable. Every officer hour clawed back from an ED is an officer hour theoretically available for visible policing of the kind National’s coalition partners want to see.
But the political incentive to be seen handling the consequences badly is equally considerable. A mental health worker assaulted, three unanswered emergency calls, a watchdog declining to investigate, a union calling for a wider backdown — these are the ingredients of a sustained election-year story that the government does not want.
The decision to delay phase four can be read as a recognition of that political reality as much as an operational judgement. The careful wording of the police statement, the absence of any new date, and the fact that the announcement came on a Tuesday morning rather than buried in a Friday afternoon news dump all suggest a government that wants this issue to rest until after November.
Whether the issue is willing to rest is another question.
What to watch from here
Three things are worth watching over the next six months.
The first is whether the IPCA reverses its decision not to investigate. The watchdog cited lack of resources, not lack of merit. If political pressure mounts — particularly if there is another incident — that calculation could shift.
The second is whether the ten mental health response teams funded in last year’s Budget actually deliver the alternative pathway the programme has always assumed they would. If they do, phase four becomes more defensible. If they don’t, the case for completing the withdrawal collapses.
The third is whether anyone in government is willing to publicly acknowledge that the original four-phase plan was, in retrospect, too ambitious for the capacity of the receiving system. Reform programmes rarely die from being too cautious. They die from being too far ahead of the reality on the ground. The Mental Health Response Change Programme has spent eighteen months edging closer to that line.
The pause announced this week is not yet a retreat. But it is the first time the question of whether the whole programme is workable has been asked from inside the tent. That, in its own quiet way, is the development worth paying attention to.
Are you a frontline mental health worker, ED nurse, paramedic or police officer with experience of how this programme is actually playing out on the ground? Drop a comment below — we read every one.