Search underway for better way to handle 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 over-policed 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.
Since then, Chief Bill Ward of the Metepenagiag Mi’kmaq Nation has said Levi was an invited guest at the home, where he had planned to seek guidance from a church minister.
Then there are the deaths of Chantel Moore, an Indigenous woman in Edmundston, N.B., who was shot by police who had come to perform a wellness check, and Regis Korchinski-Paquet, a Black woman who fell from her Toronto balcony after family members called police to her home.
The circumstances around each case have not been disclosed and are being examined by independent police investigation agencies. But experts say they highlight the myriad ways racial bias and mental-health stigma can make any police interaction dangerously fraught.
Especially for someone who is Black, Indigenous or a person of colour, the very presence of an armed officer could aggravate an already delicate situation, says the James R. Johnston chair in Black Canadian studies at Dalhousie University.
“When you have experiences, for example, in Toronto where Black men are 20 times more likely to be harmed or killed by police than [white] people, then yes, of course we’re going to be anxious,” says OmiSoore Dryden.
“And, you know, we don’t all teach our children: ‘Go to police,’ that they will help them if they’re lost or whatever,” said Dryden. “We know not to do that.”
Dryden says the very inception of policing was rooted in protecting property, which further institutionalized racism by enforcing slavery.
“It meant in the creation of this country, that those Black people fleeing slavery were captured and returned into slavery and those Black people who were freed were often trafficked into slavery, even though they weren’t slaves,” she says.
“For many that uniform is a symbol of harm and abuse and fear. It is not a symbol for care and kindness and support.”
Just like the rest of society, police officers are vulnerable to conscious and unconscious biases that can cloud their judgment, says Jennifer Lavoie, an associate professor in criminology at Wilfrid Laurier University.
“That becomes problematic when you’re a police officer and you have implicit biases that involve perceptions of threat or aggression or violence that are attached to specific populations such as BIPOC populations,” says Lavoie.
“When you’re approaching and providing services to a person they’re more than their mental health crisis. It’s important to approach that person holistically.”