A feel-good solution to policing challenges

Opinion

The Brandon Police Service (BPS) recently announced plans to launch a crisis response unit which will pair Brandon police officers with mental health professionals to assist with responding to mental-health calls. Winnipeg launched a similar program in 2021.

In his announcement of the crisis response unit, BPS Chief Tyler Bates, indicated that police have historically “responded to mental health calls for service alone.” Bates is correct. Since deinstitutionalization, the movement during which mental-health patients were discharged into the community, there has been a decline in mental-health spending over time, and people with mental-health issues have been left with few community resources.

Communities across Canada have since become saturated with people experiencing mental-health crises and without adequate infrastructure, care and treatment. These program delivery issues have created conditions whereby police have become the primary responders to mental-health calls for service.

The outcome of police as the default first responders to persons in crisis (PIC) has joined together assumptions about mental illness with risk and danger. In turn, public concern about mentally ill persons as potentially dangerous, and thus threatening to public safety, has ensured that police remain the “necessary” first responders to mental-health calls.

The widespread perception of mentally ill persons as disproportionally disorderly or dangerous, however, is mostly a baseless assumption that is not well supported by evidence. Police also perceive people with mental illness to be aggressive, violent or suicidal. This is the reason why PIC are statistically more likely to be harmed or injured during encounters with police officers. According to former Toronto Police Services Board chair Alok Mukherjee, “Between 2000 and 2020, 68 per cent of people who died in encounters with police in Canada were experiencing a mental-health crisis.”

Someone who might otherwise appear to be acting erratically to a police officer, and someone who is untrained in recognizing symptoms of a mental-health issue, could be hurt should an officer opt to use force to subdue the subject.

On the surface, mental health crisis units seem to be a logical step in the right direction in assisting PIC. However, to date, research has shown that crisis response teams have been widely implemented but with little, mixed or anecdotal evidence of effectives.

Research published last year conducted in Hamilton, Ont., by one of the co-authors found that adding a mental-health professional “fixed” logistical errors in current practice by streamlining crisis response, benefiting police and health systems. For PIC, particularly those from communities disproportionately targeted by policing, embedding crisis response within a police-led framework can perpetuate criminalization, coercion and surveillance under the guise of care. In this way, what is framed as innovation may ultimately reproduce existing inequities rather than disrupt them.

In other words, without investment in proper mental-health infrastructure, crisis response teams are just a feel-good Band-aid solution to appease the public. Furthermore, as long as police remain involved in mental-health calls, the statistical probability of PIC being harmed during an encounter with police remains unchanged.

The police routinely report to the public that they are not experts in mental health. Bates said as much in his announcement of the BPS crisis unit. Bates is correct.

Police are experts in crime, tasked with such things as apprehending criminals and reducing crime, yet they retain powers of arrest under the Canadian Mental Health Act. Thus, despite the introduction of a mental health worker to police crisis response, guided by mental health legislation, police retain the authority to arrest PIC.

The public should listen to police leaders when they tell us they are not trained to deal with health care. People experiencing crisis are not criminals, rather, they are persons in need of help by trained professionals.

Perhaps it is time we to leave crime work to police and care work of mentally ill persons to trained health-care professionals. Doing so would contribute to increased public safety, reduced harm to PIC during police encounters and would free up police resources to deal with actual crime.

Ania Theuer is an assistant professor of sociology at Brandon University and Christopher J. Schneider is professor of sociology at Brandon University. Together with Stacey Hannem of Wilfrid Laurier University, they are co-authors of the forthcoming paper entitled Policing mental illness and the contradictions of structural stigma.