Police-Encounters-With-People-In-Crisis

In-service training
RECOMMENDATION 18: The TPS consider placing more emphasis, within
the existing time allocated to in-service training if necessary, on the areas
identified in Recommendation 15.
RECOMMENDATION 19: The TPS consider requiring officers to re-qualify
annually or otherwise in the areas of crisis communication and negotiation, deescalation,
and containment measures.
RECOMMENDATION 20: The TPS consider whether to tailor in-service
mental health training to the needs and experience levels of different audiences,
such as by offering separate curricula for officers assigned to specialty units or
divisions with high volumes of crisis calls.
Decentralized training
RECOMMENDATION 21: The TPS consider how decentralized training can be
expanded and improved to focus on such issues as:
(a)
(b)
(c)
Platoon training: increasing opportunities for officers to engage in
traditional and online mental health programming within their
platoons;
Exposure: providing officers with in-service learning exercises that
involve direct contact with the mental health system and
community mental health resources; and
Peer learning: instituting a model of peer-to-peer education within
divisions, such as discussions with officers who have experience
with mental health issues in their families, who have worked on an
MCIT, who received Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) training, or
who have other related experience.
Research and curriculum design
RECOMMENDATION 22: The TPS collaborate with researchers or sponsor
research in the field of police education to develop a system for collecting and
analyzing standardized data regarding the effectiveness of training at the TPC,
OPC and the divisional levels, and to measure the impact that improvements in
training have on actual encounters with people in crisis.
RECOMMENDATION 23: The TPS consider whether a broader range of
perspectives can be considered in designing and delivering mental health
training, for example, by involving TPS psychologists, Police College trainers,
additional consumer survivors, mental health nurses and community agencies
who work with patients and police.
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