A week long inquest into the death of an individual who remains unidentified concluded today with the Jury’s Verdict and 10 recommendations.

This was an extremely difficult inquest in many ways. Out of respect for the deceased, the process adopted a practice of referring to the “unidentified male” as Roy Norman, one of the names he sometimes used. Mr. Norman was shot by police in an interaction with them in 2012. In 2015, CEWor TASER was used on him during another confrontation when ETF attended. Finally, in 2016, during a “high-risk” interaction, Mr. Norman was shot and killed by a member of the ETF, who attended.

There is of course, a lot more to his story. The evidence heard at the inquest made clear that police faced a number of significant challenges in trying to engage Mr. Norman, who was described as “selectively mute” among other things. The ETF were attending on June 17, 2016, to register Mr. Norman for the provincial Sex Offender Registry and to issue him a trespass notice as he had taken up residence on CP Rail’s property.

My client, the Empowerment Council, were granted standing at the inquest in the public interest on the basis that Mr. Norman was a “Person In Crisis” at the time of his last interaction with police. Obviously, there was no family present at the inquest. The EC’s participation focused on emphasizing trauma-informed interactions between police and members of the public, including in high risk scenarios.

The Jury returned their Verdict together with 10 recommendations that the EC is pleased to receive, as all will no doubt help to prevent future death in similar circumstances.

Below are the UIM Inquest Jury’s Recommendations

The Coroners Act – Province of Ontario Loi sur les coroners – Province de l’Ontario

Inquest into the death of: L’enquête sur le décès de:

Unidentified Male

JURY RECOMMENDATIONS

1. Expand supportive and advisory resources available to ETF teams, particularly during the risk assessment and deployment planning process. This may include drawing from existing crisis support services (e.g. Toronto Community Crisis Services). Review applicable procedures and policies to ensure they allow for this.

2. Emphasize or continue to emphasize a trauma informed approach to interactions with members of the public, including in high-risk situations.

3. Incorporate those with lived experience of mental health issues, mental health crisis, and police interaction in Crisis Negotiation training and ETF training.

4. Keeping all participants’ safety in mind, continue to encourage the TPS and ETF to make referrals to FOCUS tables and consider a means to identify persons with repeated high-risk interactions for referral.

5. Consider revision of Policy 10-05 (Incidents Requiring the Emergency Task Force) to change current reference to “psychiatric support” to “mental health support” to allow for use of a broader range of mental health professionals and community-based supports.

6. Consider establishing a policy requiring at least half of all ETF team members at any deployment be trained in crisis negotiation, in addition to the Team Leader and Sergeant.

To the Ministry of Health:

7. Identify services that a person can be referred to by police following an incident or interaction with police that results in an injury or traumatic experience.

To the Ontario Police College:

8. Incorporate those with lived experience of mental health issues, mental health crisis, and police interaction in Incident Command training.

9. Continue to foster interprofessional collaboration between police, mental health, and community service providers in training, emphasizing trauma informed approaches and practices.

To the Ministry of the Solicitor General:

10. Consider the creation of a provincial clinical support roster that provides 24/7 on-call coverage and allows for direct access to a range of mental health professionals by all provincial police services.