Police-Encounters-With-People-In-Crisis

mental illness can be impossible. The availability of affordable housing is shaped by all
levels of government—federal, provincial and municipal.
45. In recent years a “housing first” approach to addressing mental illness has gained
increasing acceptance. These programs provide housing to people who suffer from
mental illness, and once housed, these programs provide them with treatments and
supports of their choosing. 36 The key shift in thinking is that the stability that housing
security provides is a crucial building block to mental health treatment, and therefore, it
must come first. The Government of Canada allocated $110 million to the Mental Health
Commission of Canada to run its At Home/Chez Soi program, which implemented a
“housing first” approach for more than 1,000 people with mental illness in five cities
across Canada from 2009 to 2013. 37 Findings from this pilot project demonstrate that
“housing first” is not only an effective means of stabilizing people with mental illness
and ameliorating homelessness, but it is also a more efficient use of public funds for
treating mental illness than other approaches because it reduces demands on other
more costly services. 38
B. The role of the TPS in serving people in crisis
46. As mentioned above and elsewhere in this Report, a key theme expressed during
the Review is that the high volume of police interactions with people in crisis is in large
part a function of the failure of the mental health system to provide adequate
community-based treatment for mental illness. In this section, I discuss the manner in
which TPS serves people in crisis.
1. Serving people in crisis is a core part of policing in Toronto
47. Though police officers are not healthcare workers, the role of the police as the
most frequent emergency responder for people in crisis leads to the unavoidable
conclusion that police officers in Toronto form a part of the spectrum of care, in tandem
with other participants in the mental healthcare system, described in broad strokes
above. A 2013 report by the MCIT Steering Committee characterized the police and
mental health system’s dual responsibility for addressing the needs of people in crisis as
follows:
It is important to recognize that mental illness is not, in and
of itself, a police problem. However, a number of issues
caused by or associated with people with mental illness often
become police issues. … Law enforcement personnel are
routinely the first line of response for situations involving
mentally ill people in crisis and as a result, officers may have
assumed the role of “street-corner psychiatrists” by default.
Neither the mental health system nor the law enforcement
36
Id. at 11.
37
Id.
38
Id. at 6.
Police Encounters With People in Crisis |93