Riding along with a new kind of Toronto police officer,
Public Service Response Team uses referrals for services to build skills
The man in his 30s facing drug and assault charges wasn’t happy to see the two uniformed Toronto police officers standing at his front door, worried they were there to arrest him — again.
What he didn’t realize was that he was being introduced to a new kind of Toronto cop — members of a special division of the Toronto Police Service called PSRT, which stands for Public Safety Response Team that has, so far, received little public attention.
Const. Greg Henkenhaf assured the man they weren’t there to complicate his life further, as long as he was at home complying with the conditions of his release on bail. But Henkenhaf said he wanted to make him an offer: Was he interested in furthering his education or, perhaps, receive job counselling?
“He seemed receptive,” Henkenhaf said after promising to pass on the man’s contact information to the TPS gang prevention task force, which has partnered with the city, Yorktown family services, Toronto Community Housing and the John Howard Society to link accused offenders and their families with various services.
In the wake of unprecedented debate about the need for policing reform and pressure to rein in costs, Chief James Ramer told the civilian oversight board last week that PSRT demonstrates Toronto police are acting on calls for change while using existing resources more effectively to target gun and gang violence.
“We’ve changed the mandate of our Public Safety Response Team, so they’re much more engaged in proactively doing bail compliance checks and getting more arrests from people who are breaching their conditions,” Ramer told the Toronto Police Services Board during budget discussions. The team is targeting the highest-risk violent offenders, which involves being “much more precise in the way we do our policing so we’re not upending entire communities.” There was a “substantial” decrease in shootings at the end of the year, he noted, attributing some of that to PSRT.
Canada’s largest municipal service, with the blessing of the board, is asking city council next month to approve a $1.076billion operating budget for 2021 — holding the line at a zero per cent increase over 2020. PSRT’s proposed piece of that is $11.48 million for 79 uniformed officers, according to TPS budget documents.
Ramer didn’t say so, but it’s widely understood the message is that the new team is different from the old Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy (TAVIS), another specialized unit created in 2006 to combat gun violence. Initially hailed as a success by politicians and police, TAVIS was eventually disbanded over criticism that aggressive patrol tactics cast too wide a net, alienating the marginalized communities the initiative was intended to help.
PSRT is working in co-ordination with the Integrated Gang Prevention Task Force — a small unit within the force launched by Ramer in 2016 when he was a deputy police chief. After lead detectives Ron Chhinzer and Jason Kondo held town halls across the city in 2019-2020, the decision was made to revamp PSRT, which previously assisted in areas of the city experiencing a high volume of calls, or impromptu protests.
PSRT’s new mandate kicked in Oct.19 focusing on the chief’s No. 1 public safety issue: gun and gang violence, often unfolding in the city’s most marginalized communities.
Officers with the unit — all equipped with body-worn cameras — work two late afternoon-evening shifts. They still arrest people, act on intelligence, execute search warrants and conduct high-visibility patrols in areas where they anticipate retaliatory violence, often in response to online beefing and provocations taking place online.
Ramer tapped Insp. Rick Shank to run the team because of his investigative background and experience leading highrisk units. An officer who prefers to stay in the background, Shank will say publicly his overriding mission is to ensure PSRT does not stigmatize marginalized neighbourhoods.
Before heading out, Shank encourages officers to let the residents see “that you’re there with them,” by getting out of the car, engaging citizens with friendly banter, so “we’re not just driving around looking at them.”
He acknowledges that the referral program, as it’s called internally, requires changing the cultural mindset of officers. He believes that’s happening. He hears PSRT officers excited when they get a referral, especially when it’s from “a highranking gang member on charges for a shooting. They’re just as excited as they are for getting a good arrest.”
He would prefer the bail compliance checks be done by officers in plain clothes, but that’s not always possible.
On the prevention side, PSRT officers offer referrals not to just accused offenders, but to their family members. Down the road, that may help build relationships, and possibly lead to steering a younger son or brother away from gang life.
Staff. Sgt. Tighe Pollock likes to think so. The PSRT supervisor says the officers “are in a perfect spot to get services to the people who need it the most.” But, he hastens to add: “I’m not a counsellor. I’m not a job coach. It’s just a fact, I’m a police officer.”
“We’re like centralized intake, if you want something, somebody calls you, triages you … then the doctors, the experts, give what you need. We’re just facilitating,” said Pollock, sitting in his marked SUV while officers patrolled a nearby housing complex.
Pollock admits it’s a drastic departure from the policing he learned two decades ago. The new approach helps to humanize police officers. “We’re not robots. We care about what happens to people — whether they’re arrested or not.”
He likes to think “people can become allies,” but stresses he’s not talking about developing informants. “That’s not the focus of this unit. We’re not buttering people up trying to get them to give us information.”
Det. Jason Kondo is in charge of responding to the referrals. The veteran guns and gang officer, who spent his career targeting and arresting accused criminals, wastes no time trying to make arrangements, aware how quickly minds can change.
When he gets a participant on the phone, he explains the kinds of programs that are available, hears what they have to say, then asks them to call back the following day.
“Arresting people is fine, but giving people other options … makes me feel good that I’m able to help somebody,” he says.
He shares his cellphone number and says, “I’ll do as much as I can” and encourages “clients” to hand out his contact information. One of them, who was headed to the penitentiary to serve a sentence, told Kondo he planned to do just that.
Between July 1, 2020, and last month, the unit received 465 referrals, a number much higher than expected by the TPS. How many end up with help is difficult to gauge because of participant confidentiality concerns, Kondo says. And while police are pressed to produce immediate results after a surge in violence, assessing the impact of PSRT and the referral program could take years to determine.
But for a single Toronto mother who lives in public housing there are already measurable benefits.
She agreed to talk to the Star about her recent experience on the condition she not be identified because she worries about the blowback her two teen boys might face. She was asked by officers about her schooling and what she saw herself doing in the future.
She told them she was trying to get into an online course, “but the prices are crazy.” The officers returned later and asked if she would accept a bursary. “I was floored,” she says. The amount is still to be determined, and she’s currently looking to find more details.
And while she “can’t speak for all parents,” having PSRT officers doing their foot patrols is “an awesome thing.” When she was living near Jane and Finch, she timed her kids’ outdoor time to coincide with police patrols.
“Anytime I look through the window and see the officers in the park, ‘OK guys, this is our five minutes of freedom, let’s go,’ ” she says. “As long as they’re around, I take my children to go have a swing, to have a walk, to have a bike ride, and make sure to get in before they (police) disappear from the community.”
During the Zoom police board meeting, Louis March, director of Zero Gun Violence Movement, told the chief the police cannot address gun and gang violence alone, and that policing is just “one piece of it.”
“Gun violence … is a symptom of other things that are wrong, and the police have no role in that,” he said.
In an interview later with the Star, March said he has heard little about PSRT or the referral program and came up blank after speaking to several people on the street. He acknowledged it’s possible a positive interaction with the police isn’t something everyone will admit.
March elaborated on what he said to Ramer, that “the thing is the police is the police, it’s about enforcement of law. It’s not about being community service agents, they’re not trained to do that. Just their presentation, in uniform, does not allow them to do this work with any true results because people are reluctant to engage them.”
Still, March credits Ramer, “who is trying to change the way policing function unfolds in our city. However, a lot of these things are very deep-rooted, in the terms of the (police) culture, and it’s difficult to uproot that by making an announcement ‘we’re going to start to do referrals on bail checks.’ ”
Nor does Ramer know what he’s up against in terms of engaging the community “that has lost trust in the institution.”
“This is a work in progress,” March continued. “They need to continue engaging, and they need to start evaluating … it needs to be more transparent. We’re on a pathway here — but both have to move off their positions — policing and community.”
“(Police) need to continue engaging, and they need to start evaluating … it needs to be more transparent.” LOUIS MARCH
DIRECTOR OF ZERO GUN VIOLENCE MOVEMENT