Should police be first to respond to mental health calls?

Inquests into several deaths have called for changes to system

In 1988, Lester Donaldson was shot dead by a police officer in the Toronto rooming house where he lived. Donaldson, a 44-year-old Black man, was holding a small paring knife and had been diagnosed with schizophrenia.

On Saturday, Ejaz Choudry, 62, was shot dead by Peel Regional Police in his Mississauga apartment. According to Ontario’s police watchdog, officers had come to the apartment to “check on the well-being of a man.” Investigators with the Special Investigations Unit recovered a knife from the scene.

Choudry’s family has said he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and had other illnesses that made him frail. They have demanded to know why the police did not de-escalate the situation, and why his family was not allowed to try to speak to him before he was killed.

The similar circumstances of Donaldson and Choudry’s deaths along with many others in the intervening 30 years — Edmond Yu, Byron Debassige and Andrew Loku, one among a disproportionately high number of Black male victims — have been examined in several inquests, producing familiar recommendations all aimed at the same question: what must change so another person in crisis does not die?

Until now, the focus has largely been on how to improve the police response, as uniformed officers are often the first to arrive at the scene. Emphasis has been placed on more training in de-escalation and crisis communication, which has been widely criticized as being inadequate and inconsistent.

For instance, the Toronto Police Service year released a mental health and addictions strategy that included officers receiving regular training on de-escalation, bias-free policing and harm-reduction.

But following the recent deaths of Regis Korchinski-Paquet in Toronto and D’Andre

Campbell and Choudry in Peel, advocates say it is well past time to have a non-police alternative.

So far, in Ontario, a hybrid approach has emerged through the creation and expansion of Mobile Crisis Intervention Teams, which pair a mentalhealth professional with a specially trained police officer. Several Ontario police services now use variants of the program.

Toronto police introduced MCITs in 2000 and expanded coverage to the whole city by 2015. There are now 10 teams of a police officer and a mentalhealth nurse covering 16 divisions in partnership with local hospitals. Most of the teams operate seven days a week from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Peel, meanwhile, launched a Mobile Crisis Rapid Response Team in two divisions earlier this year, intending it to respond to mental health calls directly.

The programs are intended to shift typical front-line police officers away from responding to mental health calls. And rather than police transporting a person in crisis to the emergency department, the mental health professional would be able to assess them and connect them with the right support.

But many of the teams act as a secondary response, arriving after police are already at the scene. In Toronto the teams can arrive alongside police priority response unit — but only if the call doesn’t involve weapons. Last month, an MCIT response team was not sent to 911 calls about Regis Korchinsk-iPaquet, a 29-year-old Toronto woman who died after falling from a balcony shortly after police arrived in her apartment. Her family has said she was in distress.

At a news conference, Toronto police Chief Mark Saunders has said this is because two of the 911 calls included comments about a knife. “There is no way that I would put a nurse in a knife fight,” he said.

But many advocating for defunding the police say the real issue is that police shouldn’t be the first responders in these cases at all.

The very presence of officers can escalate the situation, and the presence of guns and Tasers increases the risk of harm to the person in crisis, they say.

“The police officer still has his uniform on. He still has his gun there. He’s still wearing his badge, right?” said Idil Abdillahi, an assistant professor of social work at Ryerson University. “There are people who on a day-to-day basis are doing front-line work, who go to work every day with people that are living with severe and persistent mental health issues, and are not killing those people.”

Abdillahi said the system has to shift away from making the police the default response to mental health crises, particularly outside of normal working hours.

The default message on a front-line mental health worker’s answering machine says: “I’m not available at this time. If your call is urgent please dial 911,” she said. “What can we learn from models that centre care and understand that the world operates on a 24-hour clock and not a 9-to-5 clock?”