With spotlight on policing failures, how can the system better respond to mental-health crises
TORONTO -- When someone broke into her car earlier this month, Meenakshi Mannoe knew the potential consequences of calling police. The Vancouver resident weighed several questions: Would she get her belongings back? Was it even worth the hassle? And the tipping point: What good would it ultimately do?
Ultimately, Mannoe believed it wasn’t a big deal -- she could easily replace her lost portable speaker and first aid kit, and she questioned the impact of calling the cops on someone desperate enough to take them. “Is it an inconvenience? Absolutely. But I don’t want to contribute to the over-criminalization of folks, or hyper-policing when I know that people are doing things just to get by, just to survive.”
The decision was an easy one for Mannoe, well-versed in the myriad systemic forces that underlie day-to-day struggles of many as a campaign staffer with Pivot Legal Society, which examines police accountability, drug policy, homelessness, and sex workers’ rights.
But they’re questions she says we’re increasingly facing as anger-fuelled protests draw fresh scrutiny over the prevalence of police brutality and systemic racism facing Black and Indigenous people.
The weekend killing of Rodney Levi near Metepenagiag, N.B., -- the second Indigenous person to die at the hands of an officer in that province in less than a month -- has only intensified calls to defund the police as a part of a holistic approach to re-define public safety and how it’s achieved. “From Indigenous communities we regularly hear the sentiment that people feel overpoliced and under-protected,” Mannoe said last week, before Levi’s death.
“I think this is a vital moment to really reframe what justice looks like and to heed calls from our courts like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (national inquiry) and really look at: How do we create culturally safe and responsive Indigenous-led crisis intervention?”
The defund movement doesn’t mean abolishing police -- although there are calls for that, too -- but rather is an acknowledgment that law enforcement has ballooned to encompass far-ranging responsibilities it’s incapable of addressing, says Toronto city councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam, who will introduce a motion later this month to cut Toronto’s police budget by 10 per cent. “In some ways, we have set them up to fail,” says Wong-Tam, noting calls often involve people in the throes of a mental health crisis or substance abuse.
“Asking police officers to be the social worker that shows up on the doorstep armed with guns and pepper spray, I just don’t think that has given us always the best outcome.” Levi was killed Friday night after RCMP say they responded to a complaint about an “unwanted person” at a home near Metepenagiag, about 30 kilometres west of Miramichi. Officers say they were confronted by a man carrying knives, and tried to subdue him with a stun gun. Levi was ultimately shot by an officer and declared dead in hospital.