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                              THE EMPOWERMENT COUNCIL

                                                             A Voice for the Clients of the

                                                Centre for Addiction and Mental Health

Deputation to the Toronto Police Services Board

Policing Reform Initiatives

August 18, 2020

As a Community Co-Chair of the Mental Health and Addiction Advisory Panel (MHAAP), member of the Anti-Racism Advisory Panel (ARAP), and former member of the Police and Community Engagement Review (PACER), I support all the recommendations brought forward. I also know they’re merely a beginning.

I will otherwise be addressing the Board as Executive Director of the Empowerment Council, to offer additional perspective on implementing these recommendations.

The Empowerment Council is a peer run organization. It is funded by CAMH, but is a separate organization. Its positions are directed entirely by people with personal experience of mental health and/or addiction issues. The EC (and its predecessor) have had standing at over a dozen inquests in which people have died in encounters with police and in restraints in the mental health system. It is the only organization of its kind regularly participating in inquests in Ontario, and the only one in Canada that has successfully intervened in numerous Charter cases before the Supreme Court. The EC is committed to bringing the voice of the people most effected by decisions to decision makers.

Alternative Crisis Prevention and Response Models

Alternative models of community safety must mean safety in mental health services as well as alternatives to policing. Mental health professionals and police have successfully de-escalated people, coerced people into compliance, and used force that has resulted in people’s deaths. Mental health services as well as police have used force with racial bias. If we want to save lives, and preserve quality of life, we can and must do better with ALL services.

Toronto should not imitate the American CAHOOTS model when there are examples of more empowering services that exist in Toronto right now – such as Gerstein Crisis Centre and Sound Times Support Services. Anishawabe is an example of a culturally responsive health service that includes a mobile team. All of these are services could be expanded, and could be models for the development of other support services rooted in the communities they serve. If community support services were adequately funded to be responsive to the needs of the public, the police could often be bypassed entirely, without even contacting 911. This would automatically make community services the first responder.  Toronto should also have Peer Respite Centres.  In fact, peer run initiatives in general have been found to decrease the use of emergency services such that millions of dollars can be saved. Services can coordinate with TPS, while at the same time retain their community integrity by remaining accountable to their community Boards.

It is a truism often stated by the Toronto Police Service and Board that the police are the default providers of services that could be better delivered by an alternative model. But the definition of “alternative” has not necessarily been what people on the receiving end meant. People with personal experience of crisis were surveyed about what crisis services they wanted before the MCIT was formed. They said they wanted noncoercive, nonmedical model supports. They got MCIT, which is neither or those things, as it is both police and hospital based – even though there are certainly many good people involved with the MCIT. There is evidence that people do better with services that meet their self – identified needs, so it is important to attend to what people say they need (unlike the usual practice of basing services on what service providers propose to deliver).

Community based supports that meet people’s basic human needs, such as housing, and services that can both prevent and address crises have been losing ground relative to Toronto’s needs, while the police budget has expanded. There are, in fact, fewer mobile crisis services in Toronto now than there used to be (west Toronto has none). There are fewer peer run services. There have been human and fiscal costs to this incomprehensible approach to meeting the needs of the people of Toronto – by increasing resources to policing while starving community support services. That is why this report requires the TPSB to advocate for community based supports to prevent and address crises. People can’t be policed out of the effects of poverty, prejudice and abuse.

Just as police and mental health services require greater community accountability, so does their hybrid, the Mobile Crisis Intervention Teams (MCIT). This has been reflected in inquest recommendations, but has not come to pass. MCIT also needs partnership with community based supports. This is the reason for the recommendation for a MCIT Steering Committee, and for its composition. The MCIT could move entirely to community control in the future.

Money

For there to be meaningful change in the options available to people in crisis in Toronto, the TPSB must be successful in its’ advocacy for outside $ and search inside the police budget for adequate funding for what is recommended here – community based supports. There are good strategies for finding money contained here. Everything is going to depend on there being money for community based supports.

The budget for MCIT must not be new money. The TPS budget as a whole uses money that could be directed to other supports to prevent and address crises in a way that costs less in human lives, trauma, and dollars. It can’t take more. To quote the report:

the Board should review the Service’s budget, budgetary process and service delivery with the perspective that public safety, and, in particular, crime prevention, might be more effectively, efficiently and economically provided by investing in, and through partnership with, social services and community initiatives that are currently underfunded, as well as by funding alternative crisis response models

Critical to other options than policing being available to people in crisis is that the resources be found to support them. This report calls for numerous ways to approach the freeing and accessing of more resources to this end. This is a beginning. It has to be successful for anything else to work.

Police Training

Toronto Police Service members are going to continue to need training in peaceful and empathic interacting, even if most crisis calls are ultimately addressed by other services. The majority of people in the criminal justice system are also survivors of trauma, and many victims are also traumatized, so there will be no lack of continuing need for these skills. (Service members learning to support each other in ways that enhance each others well being wouldn’t hurt either.)

The proposed content and community involvement in the delivery of police training as recommended by MHAAP and ARAP is excellent, as is the assessment of its effect. The evaluative component of training referred to in the standards for assessing the Loku recommendations that is “perceived value by police officers” should be critically examined when reviewed. The people who need it the most may like it the least.

Excerpt from the report:

…ensure this training is developed and updated based on best practice and through the active engagement of the CABR Unit, ARAP, subject matter experts in anti-racist curriculum design and community representatives with expertise in systemic racism and anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism, community representatives with experience in addressing discrimination and prejudice against people with mental health and addictions issues and with a focus on utilizing adult-oriented training methods that are proven to lead to high achievement and demonstrated applied practice by those who experience the curriculum;

Direct the Chief of Police to prepare a plan for integrating the provision of annual in-service and other training and education of Service Members by members of peer run organizations, including organizations representing people with lived experience of mental health and addiction issues, through collaborations with racialized, indigenous, LGBTQ2S+, immigrant and refugee community members skilled in training. (MHAAP #13; ARAP #27)

55.Direct the Chief of Police to review all current and future training, including judgment and other scenario based training, and ensure that it: a. prioritizes and emphasizes de-escalation; (MHAAP #14)

b. is informed by members of the communities most often affected by police use of force; (MHAAP #14; ARAP #28)

c. is relevant to the root causes and consequences of structural violence, systemic and internalized racism, negative stereotyping, intersectionalities, and use of force on people with mental health and/or addictions issues; and (MHAAP #13; ARAP #27)

d. is trauma informed. (MHAAP #13; ARAP #27) 56.Direct the Chief of Police to report of the feasibility of all uniformed Service Members receiving MCIT training or other mental health crisis response training, such as mental health first aid or emotional CPR. (ARAP #10; MHAAP 25) 57.Direct the Chief of Police to engage experts in the relevant fields to create and implement a framework to constantly evaluate the efficacy of its mental health and anti-racism training

An Ethics, Inclusivity and Human Rights training course is a progressive conceptualization.

Years ago, after G8, some instructors at the Toronto Police College showed me a power point they had developed for the Service about why public protest is an important means of moving society forward – with examples of how it had done so in the past, around the world. It was great, but as far as I know, it wasn’t used. It should be found, and used, or recreated. 

Subtitle: Money

The recommendations above are the result of the deliberations and expertise of the Board’s two Advisory Panels on Anti-Racism and Mental Health and Addictions. The recommendations for training contained here outline extensive community involvement. But without financial investment these are just words on page. Moral support, which is all the support community based training of police has been getting in the last decade, will not cut it. In fact, it has repeatedly been demonstrated to be a failure. The offer that PACER members could be involved in antibias training; the inquest recommendations that training be by people with lived experience; the willingness to have a pilot in two Divisions as recommended at the Loku inquest – all of this failed without the resources to support it. Unless substantial, the Honoraria proposed here are not going to provide the kind of consistency in education police services require, nor the quality in education communities need the police to receive. The TPSB must recommend the adequate resourcing of community developed and delivered education.

Service Accountability and Transparency

Data collection is vital to change. If we can’t see it, we can’t prove the extent of a problem, or if we are effectively changing it. Race Based Data Collection by the TPS gives the people of Toronto a tool they need to change systemic racism. MCIT will also collect data. Given the biases apparent in policing and mental health services, finding them in MCIT practice would be unsurprising, but if it exists at all we do not know what form this might take. Could there be biases in referrals to MCIT by Primary Response Units (PRU)? Differences in apprehensions under the Mental Health Act? To what services do which people get referred? What gaps are there in referral options e.g. peer options, culturally responsive services? These are all questions that are important to have answered.

Conduct Accountability

Transparency and Accountability are essential ingredients to public trust. In this regard, body worn cameras are of mixed value. We have supported them at inquests as one of the few means of evaluating whether training is being manifested in practice. But especially in the post pandemic economy, the great expense could be better spent on public services. However, if they are going to be adopted, we hope they can be applied to stop the absurd entitlement that allows service members to refuse to share work product (notes) with the SIU.

Proactive investigation of officers who repeatedly use force or have repeated conduct complaints is obviously a good thing.

Use of Force

Advocating to the provincial government that all police responses, including de-escalation, no longer be depicted as positions on a Use of Force wheel, could help shift police culture away from an emphasis on constant readiness to move to higher levels of control or force.

Public Education

The lack of public understanding of their rights, and police responsibilities, and public and police options for accessing supports for a crisis, has been apparent in numerous consultations and inquests. It certainly needs addressing. PACER was close to implementing a Know Your Rights campaign regarding street checks (carding) that should be revisited when conducting consultations on a Know Your Rights campaign.

Qualifications for Chief

To the qualities sought in a new Chief, add: evidence of an understanding and broad appreciation of human rights, and a commitment to shift police services from a paramilitary culture to one of public service (beginning with recruit training).

Community Consultation

A comment on the following excerpt from the report below – Mental Health and Addiction “experts” must include organizations representing the people most effected. It is no more appropriate to invite only mental health and addiction service providers than it would be to invite only male providers of services to women, and no women.

City Council direct the City Manager to establish and resource an Accountability Table with annual reporting, similar to that established for the Toronto Seniors Strategy, by September 2020, composed of representatives of Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour, mental health and addictions experts, homeless advocates, and other equity-seeking groups to monitor the implementation including budgetary impacts of all recommendations pertaining to City Council’s decision.

The Mental Health and (now) Addiction Advisory that was initially out of the Voss inquest, and the Anti – Racism Advisory out of the Loku inquest, were originally conceived of as standing committees, as these are standing issues in Toronto and in all policing. It is an important recommendation that they continue to advise the Board.

This time is an opportunity for the TPSB to make the most significant changes it has ever made to the quality of life in our city. Move forward with courage.

Jennifer Chambers