Officer to specialize in mental-health responses
Amhertsburg police say rollout will help deal with rising volume of illness calls
The Amherstburg Police Service will soon join the ranks of other local departments in providing a specialized response for individuals dealing with mental-health issues.
An extensively trained full-time officer will soon be available to respond to crisis situations and offer support on calls involving individuals with mental-health issues, said police spokesman Sgt. Matt Chapel-Cure.
The number of calls the service receives that involve someone dealing with a mental-health issue have been on the rise.
Chapel-Cure said 67 mentalhealth-related calls were noted in 2016 and the numbers have increased each year since Chief Tim Berthiaume began keeping track of them in 2014. And the numbers may be even higher because of the way police previously tracked calls.
“If we get called to an assault and a person gets arrested for assault, the way it gets cleared out is as an assault,” Chapel-Cure said. “If the person had, let’s say they were schizophrenic or bi-polar, and had committed that offence, their mental-health problem may have been part of what caused that offence to take place but it still would just get marked as an assault.”
The department will now track all calls with a mental-health component for followup by the yet-to-beassigned officer.
Chapel-Cure said the aim is to reduce any return calls and also ensure the individuals are getting the help, access to services and support they need.
“Unfortunately, we have a high recidivism rate with people with mental-health issues,” he said.
Chapel-Cure said most officers are already given training in crisis intervention but beginning April 1, the newly assigned officer will receive additional training with a focus on proactive intervention.
The officer will work in collaboration with specialized critical care staff from the Community Crisis Centre at Hotel-Dieu Grace Healthcare. As well, the Amherstburg officer will work closely with a LaSalle officer because ChapelCure said often two officers are needed for calls involving mentalhealth issues.
Staff Sgt. Peter Chevalier couldn’t provide statistics but he said the number of calls dealing with mental-health issues has been increasing in LaSalle over the last 10 years.
An officer in the LaSalle department will be re-assigned sometime in April.
Chevalier said LaSalle has applied for funding under the Police Effectiveness and Modernization Grant program offered by the Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services. Provincial grants will also cover the cost of the training and additional duties of the Amherstburg officer.
“We’re working in partnership with the community crisis centre, Amherstburg and us to do very similar mental-health initiatives that are taking place within other areas of Windsor, Essex County,” Chevalier said.
“There’s the COAST program that’s operating out of Windsor and there’s also the mental-health response unit that the OPP’s been working on.”
Windsor’s Community Outreach and Support Team (COAST) is a well-established program that includes a plain clothes officer and a crisis worker providing crisis and mental-health assessments to individuals over age 16 who are marginalized and vulnerable with complex mental-health and psychosocial problems.
They facilitate access to community services and supports, help deal with housing and financial issues, substance abuse and physical care needs in an attempt to lessen the drain on hospital and police resources.
From May 2013 to August 2015, the COAST team fielded more than 4,500 calls and visited more than 2,700 people in their homes.
The Essex County OPP recently launched a formal initiative with Leamington District Memorial Hospital for anyone brought to the hospital by police under the Mental Health Act.
Police said the new program aims to ensure patients who are accompanied by OPP are transitioned as quickly as possible from police to hospital and that they receive standardized, efficient care.
Chapel-Cure said the Amherstburg department will also try to identify further training for all officers “to help make it a little bit easier when they get calls for service that involve a person with mental-health issues” and to try to develop further involvement by the department in the community.
“We’re hoping that it really helps us to serve the community better,” he said.
We’re working in partnership with the community crisis centre, Amherstburg and us to do very similar mental-health initiatives that are taking place within other areas.