Police-Encounters-With-People-In-Crisis

78. Some may consider a statistical analysis of the number of such deaths to be
offensive or impersonal, and perhaps symptomatic of the problem of treating people
with mental health issues as objects rather than human beings. That is certainly not my
intention.
79. Ultimately, the goal for the Service in any given year should be zero deaths of
people in crisis—and indeed, zero deaths of any police officer or member of the public.
In working toward that goal, it is relevant for the TPS to assess whether it is succeeding
in reducing its use of lethal force in encounters with people in crisis from year to year. In
order to perform this assessment, the TPS needs to and does keep track of data showing
facts such as the population of the City of Toronto, the number of TPS calls for service in
the year, the number of calls for service involving mental health issues, the number of
encounters with people in crisis in which a weapon or violence is used by the person,
and the number of deaths, among other things. It is for this reason that I set out the
following statistical data.
80. According to data collected by the TPS and provided to the Review, the TPS had
1,914,653 calls for service in 2013, including both emergency and non-emergency calls.
This is roughly consistent with the number of calls for service in 2012 and 2011. These
calls for service do not represent the entire universe of police contacts with members of
the public. The TPS has more than 1.5 million additional contacts per year in the form of
traffic enforcement stops, arrests, vehicle stops, and recorded community interactions.
The total number of contacts with community members per year in recent years has
thus been in the range of 3.5 million contacts. The population of the City of Toronto,
according to the most recent Statistics Canada data (from 2011) is 2,615,060. 9
81. Out of the 1,914,653 calls for service in 2013, 29,611 (or 1.5%) were identified as
involving what the TPS refers to as an “emotionally disturbed person” or EDP.
82. A single event may elicit multiple calls for service. In 2013, out of the 1,914,653
calls for service, police were dispatched to the scene 838,483 times. Out of the 29,611
“EDP calls,” police were dispatched 20,550 times. This means that EDP calls made up
approximately 2.5% of all occasions on which police were dispatched in 2013. The
number of police dispatches in response to EDP calls in 2012 was lower at 18,839, and
the percentage of EDP-related dispatches was also lower in 2012 at 2.0% (18,839
dispatches out of 921,722).
83. Out of the 20,550 dispatches in response to EDP calls in 2013, the TPS
apprehended a person under the Mental Health Act on 8,384 occasions. 10 This
represents 8,384 apprehensions rather than 8,384 separate individuals, as some
individuals were apprehended under the Mental Health Act on more than one occasion
in the year. The number of such apprehensions in 2012 was 8,543 and in 2011 was
9
Statistics Canada, “Focus on Geography Series, 2011 Census: Census metropolitan area of Toronto, Ontario” (2014), online:
Statistics Canada . The census metropolitan area of Toronto includes the area within which the TPS operates and
does not include other parts of the Greater Toronto Area (such as Mississauga, Brampton, Markham, Vaughan, Oakville, etc.).
10
R.S.O. 1990, c. M.7.
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