Changes have been made since Abdirahman Abdi died. Could they have helped him?
Limitations of initiatives launched after Abdi's death take centre stage at inquest
The Abdirahman Abdi inquest is being livestreamed during weekdays here. It will resume on Monday, Dec. 2 at 9:30 a.m.
One of the first 911 calls made about Abdirahman Abdi on July 24, 2016, was from a woman in Hintonburg who said he'd reached inside a car a few minutes earlier and groped her.
She didn't know the 38-year-old Somali-Canadian man or anything about his mental health struggles in the months leading to that morning; until recently, few people besides Abdi's relatives knew the details. But she wanted to flag his behaviour.
One minute later, the Ottawa Police Service (OPS)'s communications centre got another call, this time from staff at a coffee shop.
They said Abdi had thrown himself on top of a customer. What's more, they said he'd made workers feel uncomfortable in recent days by staring and saying "fairly disturbing" things to them.
"He seems to have a hard time cognitively," the manager told 911 as Abdi moved outside.
"So you think he has some mental health issues?" the call taker asked.
"He just assaulted another woman," the manager said only seconds later, quickly amending his description to say that it looked "more like he was just grabbing at them."
A minute and a half later, Abdi appeared to be trying to shake people's hands, the manager said.
"It seems as though he's going from one mood to another."
These bystander reports got fed into the Ottawa police pipeline, including the computer terminals inside officers' vehicles. The log mentioned a "disturbance" and then, several lines down, "possible MHA issues," referring to Ontario's Mental Health Act.
The events of that day are now the subject of a coroner's inquest that reached its rough midpoint on Friday. It's happening because of what unfolded in a short span of time after those first calls to 911.
A police officer arrived and tried to handcuff Abdi, but he fled to his apartment building. A violent altercation then ensued, under circumstances that remain intensely debated today.
Another officer punched Abdi in the head several times while he was on the ground. He died in hospital the next day, sparking outrage in Ottawa and beyond — anger that flashed again when that officer was acquitted of manslaughter in 2020.
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No one is on trial during the inquest. Instead, the wide-ranging fact-finding process is hearing from more than 20 witnesses so that a jury of five people can recommend ways to prevent deaths like Abdi's in the future.
Abdi's family settled a lawsuit with police in 2020 mainly because of an agreement by the force's civilian oversight body, the Ottawa Police Services Board, to implement a new mental health response strategy, according to a statement read out by lawyer Lawrence Greenspon on day one of the inquest.
"We were hopeful that something good would come from Abdirahman's death," Greenspon said, reading from the statement.
The longer the inquest goes on, however, the more complicated the jury's mission seems — in part because of the mix of behaviours that put Abdi on his path with police.
'Would not have made a difference for Mr. Abdi'
The Ottawa Guiding Council for Mental Health and Addictions, which took centre stage Friday during the inquest's tenth day, was formed in early 2021 at the initiation of OPS.
"Mr. Abdi's death was definitely a spark," co-director Liz Wigfull said, "but also the Black Lives Matter movement and pressure from the community as well."
Staff canvassed community opinions on ways to deal with people in crisis that don't involve the police, since their presence can be triggering for racialized people due to previously bad experiences, said Sahada Alolo, the council's other co-director.
The council's mandate was limited to situations that do not involve criminality or safety risks.
The most tangible outcome of its work was the launch this past August of the Alternate Neighbourhood Crisis Response, or ANCHOR, a program that diverts mental health calls to crisis workers responding in teams of two, though the council is not involved operationally.
But the program has its limitations. It only operates in Centretown and is only funded for three years, though Wigfull and Alolo said they were working to change that and expand its footprint.
Even if it had existed in 2016, ANCHOR would not have applied the day of Abdi's arrest — not just because it doesn't reach into Hintonburg, the inquest heard several times Friday, but because of the allegations of criminality that morning.
"So despite all the great work that has been done by the guiding council, [it] would not have made a difference for Mr. Abdi," said Tina Hill, another lawyer representing Abdi's family.
"I think that's fair, yeah," replied Wigfull.
'Does that make any sense to you at all?'
Some groups at the inquest, in trying to steer the jury toward recommendations to help people under Abdi's circumstances, are questioning those apparent limitations, however.
The Black Action Defence Committee, which advocates for people in police-involved deaths, wondered whether the exclusion of calls involving criminality is too "limiting."
"It should not necessarily be, 'Well, ANCHOR can't respond,'" said committee lawyer Rick Frank.
Anita Szigeti, a lawyer for the Empowerment Council, which represents people with mental illnesses, asked about a scenario where someone is shoplifting but also has obvious signs of mental distress.
ANCHOR wouldn't go, Wigfull said.
"Does that make any sense to you at all?" Szigeti asked. "Why wouldn't we want trained crisis intervention persons ... to be able to attend on a nonviolent call where there's no safety concerns?"
"That is very complex," replied Alolo, "because most of the time, it's third parties calling. And when they call, they cannot tell if someone has a mental health issue unless they see a display of it."
The reliability of the information given to 911 also came up the previous day during testimony by Eric Janus, who runs OPS's call centre.
Information obtained from 911 callers can be notoriously inaccurate, Janus said under questioning by the police force's own lawyer.
And sometimes there simply isn't enough time to assess the mental health components of a call, as the officers involved in Abdi's arrest testified earlier in the inquest.
"We need to focus on the critical pieces when it comes to the safety of our members and the public," Janus said.
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A potential compromise
Alolo proposed a compromise Friday where police initially assess a situation "that borders on criminality," and if the call involves mental health and the conditions allow, ANCHOR gets involved too.
"I don't know how legally that could potentially work," Alolo said, pointing out that the Police Services Act requires police to respond to criminal situations.
"But personally, that would be one way that I would champion."
On the other hand, community members consulted by the council did not recommend a mental health response that involves the police, she added.
ANCHOR may not have been able to help Abdi on the day of his arrest, but it could have played a role in the months leading up to it, the inquest heard later on Friday.
In early 2016, after Abdi returned to Canada from Ethiopia, he grew quiet and reclusive following his divorce. He was also worried he'd be deported, according to a detailed summary of his mental health struggles.
Both Abdi and his family called 911 asking for police. He was not eating enough and seemed confused. He also sounded paranoid but not violent.
ANCHOR, had it existed back then, might have responded to all of those calls, Wigfull said.
The inquest also heard Friday about Ottawa Paramedic Service's Mental Well-being Response Team.
Launched in March 2022, the program pairs a paramedic with a registered mental health professional and responds to 911 calls.
It "absolutely" might have responded to a call Abdi's brother-in-law made to 911 in early 2016, in which he expressed concerns that Abdi had not eaten for a few days and was reportedly seeing things and hearing voices, said Logan Martin, acting commander of operations for the paramedic service.
"The team very much could have worked with him and his family on a care plan," she said.
The inquest continues on Monday, with Ottawa police's deputy chief and a representative for the Ottawa Police Services Board still among those left to testify.
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