TY - INPR JF - The Police Journal: Theory, Practice and Principles A1 - Kyprianides, Arabella A1 - Bradford, Ben KW - Policing KW - mental health KW - review N2 - Existing evidence suggests exposure to police activity negatively impacts the mental health of the policed. But research on whether, and why, police activity is correlated with the prevalence of mental health challenges among individuals and in specific areas remains piecemeal. We conducted a Rapid Evidence Assessment (REA) of the literature examining the association between policing and mental health, with a focus on investigating whether people in poor mental health are more likely to interact with police, whether police activity is higher in areas where people face more mental health challenges, and the reasons for these interactions. A total of 31 studies exploring the scale and reach of police encounters involving individuals dealing with mental health issues were included. The evidence suggests a pattern of heightened policing activity in specific geographic areas where individuals contend with elevated mental health challenges, and police spend more time dealing with individuals with mental health issues compared to the general population. These interactions occur for a wide variety of reasons, and people with mental health conditions encounter the police as victims, offenders, people in need and in other roles. Implications and directions for future research are discussed. ID - discovery10204708 PB - SAGE Publications UR - https://doi.org/10.1177/0032258x251318210 SN - 0032-258X N1 - This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). TI - Policing and mental health: A rapid evidence assessment of the patterning of police activity AV - public Y1 - 2025/01/30/ ER -