West Midlands Police’s announcement that it had ordered the closure of the blog and Twitter account of Inspector Michael Brown – ‘the mental health cop’ – has caused astonishment and anger in equal measure.
Thousands of grateful patients, police officers and doctors have followed Brown online ever since he realised that he had had only two hours of mental health training. He decided to remedy his ignorance in 2011. He went about finding ways to cut deaths in custody by ‘providing officers with information about how to handle mental health calls and to manage clinical risks’.
Numerous prizes, including the Mind Digital Media award, followed. Everyone loved him apart from the Corporate Communications Department at the West Midlands Police. Assistant Chief Constable Garry Forsyth, who is responsible for ‘customer services’, said last week that he was investigating Brown for ‘misuse of a force [Twitter] account’.
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