More talking, less shooting

For years, coroner’s juries have called for more police training on how to de-escalate a tense situation instead of resorting to a gun. Two years ago, Ontario Ombudsman Paul Dubé issued a report saying he had counted more than 100 such recommendations since the 2013 shooting death of Sammy Yatim on a Toronto streetcar.

De-escalation training was also a prominent theme of former Supreme Court Justice Frank Iacobucci’s 2014 report on Yatim’s death.

But, as the Star’s Wendy Gillis reported this week, a government-commissioned study found that all of these pleas and more have largely fallen on deaf ears at the Ontario Police College, where every new recruit attends mandatory training before being sworn in.

There, the study’s researchers found, training on this vital skill set is both inconsistent and “superficial.”

That leaves police forces across the province to fill in the gaps. For some, that training is deemed a “luxury” that they simply can’t afford.

The reality, of course, is that police forces and the college cannot afford not to ensure all police officers are armed with the tools they need to try and solve a situation without the use of deadly force.

As the report points out, the Ministry of Community Safety must ensure that occurs by revamping the training at the Ontario Police College and developing a mandatory annual update program for every sworn officer in these modern policing methods.

The importance of de-escalation training cannot be underestimated, and Ontario can’t have a patchwork system that leaves some officers without the training they need.

A recent “Deadly Force” investigation by CBC News, for example, found that 70 per cent of the 460 people who died in police encounters in Canada since 2000 suffered from a mental illness or addiction.

Among them were people such as Yatim, who was shot less than 50 seconds after officers arrived on the scene when he ignored commands to drop a small knife, and Michael MacIsaac, who was killed in 2013 by a Durham police officer after running through the streets naked, banging on car windows.

Such encounters have made the public worry about what kind of help will arrive if they call the police when someone is in emotional distress or a mental-health crisis.

The training is so patchwork that Steve Summerville, a former Toronto police officer and longtime use-of-force instructor, quipped that “if you call 911because a family member is in distress, you have to say to the dispatcher, please only send officers who have received de-escalation training.”

The benefits of such training were brought to the fore when Toronto police Const. Ken Lam arrested the suspect in April’s van rampage without firing a single shot. After arriving at the chaotic scene, he turned off his siren so he could try and talk to the suspect. He refused to be baited into shooting him and put his own gun away in favour of a baton, and then made the arrest without incident.

The Toronto police added extra de-escalation training to its in-service courses following the shooting of Yatim. But it shouldn’t be up to individual police forces to decide how much or how little of this vital training their officers get.

The use of deadly force should be the last resort for police officers. To make that happen more often, though, requires all police to get the training they need so when a tense situation erupts, talking is — at least — as much a part of their reaction as shooting.

The next provincial government needs to standardize and increase training province-wide so more cases end without the need for a coroner’s inquest.

A recent report found that de-escalation training is at best “superficial” at the Ontario Police College and considered an unaffordable luxury by some forces