After police shootings in Winnipeg, advocate says crisis workers should respond to more calls
Man shot by police last week on Mental Health Act call was 1 of 6 killed in police encounters since October
Police and emergency dispatchers need to have more faith that crisis workers can deal with mental health calls instead of taking a police-first approach, one advocate says, after several deaths in recent months following encounters with Winnipeg police.
Jennifer Chambers, executive director of the Toronto-based Empowerment Council — a mental health advocacy organization funded by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, or CAMH — says more well-being calls need to be diverted to non-police-led crisis response teams.
"Clearly police aren't the best people to be dealing with someone in crisis," said Chambers, who also sits on the Toronto Police Service's mental health and addictions advisory panel.
"How many people have to die in crisis before it's obvious that we have to do something differently?"
People in crisis are often frightened in police encounters, "and people who are frightened get defensive," Chambers said.
"So what looks like aggression is actually people's attempt to defend themselves."
Since October of 2023, there have been at least six cases where people died following encounters with Winnipeg police.
The latest was last week, when 59-year-old Bradley Singer was shot dead by Winnipeg police after officers attempted to take him to hospital for a non-voluntary examination under the province's Mental Health Act.
"People shouldn't die because they're having a crisis," said Chambers. "They should have crisis workers. It's not a complicated concept."
She said police have become the de facto mental health service, because they're usually the only service adequately resourced to show up on short notice in response to a crisis.
But with rising rates of mental illness in the country, cities need to move away from a police-first approach in these situations, she said.
Resources outpaced by demand for help: doctor
According to CAMH, in any given year, roughly 20 per cent of Canadians experience a mental illness.
"When you look at the rates of mental illness in the province, we know that they're very high," said Dr. James Bolton, the medical director of crisis response services for Manitoba's Shared Health.
In the last five years, more than a quarter of Manitoba adults have seen a physician for a mental illness-related reason, according to Bolton.
"That doesn't even capture all the people that are seeing psychologists or counsellors, or all the people that are suffering at home," he said.
While there is a spectrum when it comes to mental health, resources are being outpaced by the escalating number of people in need of help, Bolton said.
"The demand out there is great," he said.
Mental illnesses are often clustered together, he said — a person may be dealing with depression or anxiety, along with psychosis, and could have an addiction layered on top of that, which can complicate the clinical picture and diagnosis.
It can be difficult, even for seasoned professionals, to intervene when someone is dealing with mental illness, said Bolton.
"The situation can change quite quickly. They can be unpredictable."
Winnipeg crisis response has limitations
A previous CBC investigation found that across Canada, nearly 70 per cent of the people who died in police encounters between 2000 and 2020 struggled with mental health issues, substance abuse or both.
In addition to the Feb. 13 shooting of Bradley Singer, recent police-involved deaths in Winnipeg include:
- Elias Whitehead, who died after an encounter with Winnipeg police on Oct. 15 at the intersection of Sherbrook Street and Broadway.
- Dustin Hatcher, who was shot by police in a south Winnipeg neighbourhood on Nov. 28.
- The shooting of a 52-year-old man during a hostage situation on Furby Street on Dec. 29.
- The Dec. 31 shooting of international student Afolabi Stephen Opaso, 19, during a well-being call on University Crescent.
- James Wood, 35, who died on Jan. 27 after police were called to the Crestview neighbourhood in west Winnipeg.
During a January news conference following the death of Opaso — who was having a mental health crisis when police were called, according to a family spokesperson — Winnipeg police Chief Danny Smyth said officers now respond to more well-being calls than calls related to domestic incidents, which at one time were the most common type of service calls.
Less than half of one per cent of those well-being calls result in any type of use of force, Smyth said.
However, neither the well-being call involving Opaso nor the Mental Health Act call involving Singer included utilizing the alternative response to citizens in crisis, or ARCC, program — which pairs plainclothes police officers with mental health workers to respond to non-violent and non-emergent crisis situations.
However, ARCC only provides secondary responses once a situation is deemed safe. Uniformed police officers are typically still the first responders, particularly for calls involving a weapon.
Bolton said police will do the initial "vetting of that situation and determine if there's weapons, if somebody's really aggressive — can we send out the ARCC team with the mental health clinician?"
If not, "then police have to take that one on their own," he said.
But advocates like Chambers said that defeats the purpose.
"It would be far less scary for people to have a community-based crisis worker show up than a police officer," she said.
While ARCC has shown promise, there are still many limitations to it.
Smyth said in January that on average, Winnipeg police officers have responded to almost 21,000 well-being calls annually in recent years. A report on the ARCC program's pilot year said in 2022, its teams engaged in 882 police events.
However, last December, the program was expanded from five to seven days a week, operating from 9 am to 9 pm.
Shared Health said the program is currently fully staffed, with four clinicians.
Bolton called the program "a major step forward in trying to improve the way we deal with people who are in crisis in the community," but added "it doesn't necessarily apply to every situation that we face."
Standardize cross-country response: advocate
Chambers says a cross-country standard for responding to mental health calls is needed.
Standardization of best practices for police was also one of the recommendations made by the jury at the inquest into the 2013 death of Sammy Yatim in Toronto — an inquest where Chambers appeared as a witness.
Yatim was fatally shot by a police officer while alone on a streetcar and holding a small knife.
Earlier this month, the jury at a coroner's inquest into his death delivered 63 recommendations, touching on issues such as officer training and monitoring, peer intervention and mental health supports.
Chambers added that standardization in responses is important because some community members are more vulnerable to having force used against them because of racial bias.
"Certainly Black and Indigenous peoples are more likely to experience use of force when in crisis," she said.
"So there has to be standardized, well-researched training developed in consultation with communities that's available to police officers throughout the country."
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