Police face tough choices on crisis calls

Experts say more funding needed to help handle suicide attempts

The 27-year-old woman was clinging to the side of a downtown Oshawa parking garage, balancing on a narrow ledge 20 metres above the ground, when Durham Region police responded.

They found her with a skate lace wrapped tightly around her neck. Officers heard she had already told her loved ones goodbye.

“People just feel like they can’t be fixed. They’re at a loss. They have no hope left,” said Const. Kayleen Browell, who was on the other side of the wall, talking the woman through her crisis from a metre away.

“I told her that it took more courage to be on this side of the wall than the other side,” Browell said of the Oct. 2 incident.

The woman finally grabbed onto her hand, and was taken to hospital following a tense, hour-long conversation.

Police in the GTA respond to thousands of suicide-attempt calls each year, and interactions with officers are often a major gateway into the mental-health system. But experts say police don’t get enough training.

A lack of community resources also means police often need to be creative about making referrals to other mentalhealth services, said Jennifer Lavoie, an associate professor at Wilfrid Laurier University’s criminology department.

“If (police) don’t know about other options that are available in the community, then the research tells us that the officer is more likely to arrest that person in order to control their behaviours,” she said. “There’s an aspect of criminalization that we need to be very careful of.”

Lavoie was recently awarded national funding for a four-year research project in partnership with Brock University to design a scenario-based program for police officers to improve interactions with people in a mental-health crisis.

Though there is no national or provincial standard on crisis-intervention training hours for officers, the industry standard is about 40 hours, but most officers only get a “woefully inadequate” average of one to 20 hours, Lavoie said.

“I think that police officers are wearing many hats these days, but it’s very good for our community to know that there is a specialty team that has a really good background, understanding and experience within the mental-health system,” CONST. KAYLEEN BROWELL DURHAM REGIONAL POLICE

The volume of mental-health related calls is significant: A Statistics Canada study found that in 2013, more than one in every 50 calls received by Toronto police involved an officer dispatched for a person in crisis, and one in every 100 calls resulted in an arrest under the Mental Health Act.

Last year, Toronto police responded to 919 suicide-attempt calls with about 20 per cent of the calls ending in a fatality. This translates to 206 suicides in 2016, and 168 suicides so far in 2017.

In Peel, there were 555 suicide attempt calls and 67 fatalities in the region last year, and 55 fatalities so far this year.

Durham police have responded to 2,355 attempt suicide calls this year, 40 ending in fatalities.

Peel Region has a Crisis Outreach Assessment Support Team, or COAST, which Lavoie says is considered to be one of the best models.

In an email, Peel police said specially trained officers are paired with mental-health professionals to respond to callers “while maintaining their dignity . . . in an effort to provide a resolution and prevent further involvement with the criminal justice system.”

Durham has a similar system, with two full-time teams comprised of a specially trained officer and mental health support nurse from a local partner hospital, Lakeridge Health. The officer-nurse duo attends relevant calls, and will also do follow-ups on people apprehended under the Mental Health Act, whether through phone calls or visits.

Insp. Bruce Townley, who oversees Durham’s mental-health response unit, said a lot of the capacity for police to respond comes down to funding.

“It’s about providing the appropriate resources — and that includes funds — to have a better response model in how we’re going to help these folks,” he said.

Const. Browell is one of the force’s mental-health response experts. These officers get one week of specialized training in a session that runs twice a year. Since 2007, about 180 officers have completed the training.

“I think that police officers are wearing many hats these days, but it’s very good for our community to know that there is a specialty team that has a really good background, understanding and experience within the mental-health system,” she said.