Police shouldn’t be mental-health first responders

The topic of “defunding police” is, to understate the point, thorny and complex, in no small part because it doesn’t actually mean taking all funding away from police, but rather taking some away and investing in community health and welfare programming, as distinct from law enforcement.

We’re not intending to tackle the overall, enormous, subject, today. But there is a good discussion to be had about one aspect of it — removing from police the responsibility for dealing with front-line mentalhealth crisis response.

Currently, a significant percentage of the calls police deal with involve people in mental-health distress. They do it, and thankfully do so successfully, for the most part. But this is one area that is always fraught with risk, in part because mental-health crisis response is not the prime responsibility of police. Most are not experts in the area. So it is not surprising that when there are serious incidents between police and civilians, mental health is often central to the situation.

This isn’t new, but it’s also not that old. Police have not always been mental-health first responders. That’s a situation that evolved over years, driven in part by the deinstitutionalization of people suffering mental-health issues.

And so, here we are. Police spend much of their time responding to situations they have some, but not a lot, of training in dealing with. Problems often occur. That appears to be the case with what happened to Ejaz Choudry, a 62-year-old Mississauga man suffering with schizophrenia. He was in mental distress, his family called 911 and he ended up being fatally shot by police.

His story is depressingly common. So much so that advocates and experts have filed report after report calling for social workers and health professionals take over the primary first response role, calling police only when necessary.

This keeps cropping up, experts keep recommending reform, and overall, those studies and reports go unanswered. Why is a very good question but not for today. What matters more is we now have a perfect opportunity and pressing need to change this aspect of policing. And Hamilton could well be an integral part of that.

This community has historically been a leader in reforming the way people in mental-health distress interact with “the system.” There’s the Crisis Outreach and Support Team (COAST) which partners police officers with mental-health workers. It was among the first programs of its kind when it was launched years ago.

There’s also the Mobile Crisis Rapid Response Team, which sees mental-health professionals partner with police to respond to 911 calls from people in crisis. And there’s the Social Navigator Program, which is a referral service that diverts people away from the courts and toward social service agencies.

In short, there is a very solid foundation in Hamilton that could evolve into a new system in which nonpolice personnel take the lead in dealing with mental-health crisis response.

The biggest challenge is removing police officers from the front-line response to these situations, while keeping them available for the rare episode where their core skills are needed.

For this to work, political will is needed on multiple levels. The police service has to be on board, as does the police union. Local government has to be supportive. And the provincial government needs to buy into the concept and be willing to make any needed regulatory changes. It’s a big change that poses challenges. But the time has come to try different alternatives to mental-health crisis response.