Police-Encounters-With-People-In-Crisis

Chapter 7. Training
1. This chapter discusses the new recruit and in-service training provided to all TPS
officers. As noted in Chapter 8 (Supervision), police officers also develop skills through
their experiences while on duty and from interacting with other members of the Service.
The importance of such informal education should be not overlooked, as the judgment
and communications skills required to resolve situations with people in crisis cannot be
acquired through formal training programs alone.
2. Other reviews, studies and inquests have considered and made recommendations
regarding police training generally, and the TPS training relating to people in crisis
specifically. The TPS has considered and implemented many of those recommendations
as to the content and delivery method of its recruit and in-service training curricula. As
a result, Toronto Police Service offers reasonably well-developed training on
understanding and responding to people in crisis. This chapter makes some additional
recommendations in this area, and several recommendations in other chapters also
touch on training. As with other areas examined by this Review and as discussed in
Chapter 5 (Police Culture), the TPS should be proud of its commitment to date in
advancing training regarding people in crisis, but must continue the process of selfexamination
and improvement in the effort to reduce the prospect that lethal force will
be used in crisis situations.
3. However, training and education are just two factors among many that influence
police decision-making and conduct in interactions with people in crisis. Other factors
include the Service culture, mentorship, supervision, leadership, discipline, officers’ own
mental, emotional and physical health, as well as other police resources and community
resources—topics discussed in other chapters of this Report.
I. The Current Situation
A. Importance and impact of training
4. In the course of this Review, my team and I read many academic reports and
commentaries on the link between training and police interactions with people in crisis.
As two well-known researchers in the field have noted, a training curriculum is only as
strong as the people who deliver it and the social context in which it is implemented. 1
Further, they highlight that the lack of standardized data about training programs and
outcomes of crisis situations prevent police services and researchers from identifying
the components of a curriculum that are most effective in producing positive resolutions
of encounters with people in crisis. This dearth of evidence has been attributed to
insufficient police service record-keeping systems, especially in primary response
1
Terry G. Coleman & Dorothy Cotton, Police Interactions with Persons with a Mental Illness: Police Learning in the Environment
of Contemporary Policing (Ottawa, ON: prepared for the Mental Health Commission of Canada, May 2010) at 5 [Cotton &
Coleman, Police Learning].
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