There’s a disturbed individual living in the West Shore area who comes to the attention of the members of the RCMP detachment routinely.
Routinely, as in almost every single day.
Chris Boucher, the acting staff sergeant in charge, referred to the case recently. Just by the numbers, it’s a vivid representation of what police everywhere are facing, and handling with very limited success.
Boucher was talking to a legislature committee last week that is conducting an inquiry into the Police Act. One of the areas of interest is the role of police in dealing with mental health, addictions and harm reduction.
It’s obvious to everyone now that people with problems in that sphere are taking up more police time. Boucher’s account brings home how much more.
The person in the West Shore accounted for 120 Mental Health Act complaints between April 2019 and March 2020. Those were among the 1,101 mental health-related calls dealt with by the detachment that year. In the next year, up to March, 2021, the person accounted for 340 of the 1,250 mental health-related complaints.
The overall numbers are concerning, but don’t tell the whole story. The situation is worse than that.
Police record-keeping also tracks complaints where mental health issues are not the main issue, but are considered to be in the background. Over the time period Boucher was discussing, there was another 1,111 such cases in the first year and 1,571 in the second, an increase of 41 per cent.
Also, Greater Victoria has an integrated mobile crisis response team that is dedicated to handling such cases. It’s a collaboration between police departments and several service providers. It engages with high risk mental health patients on an ongoing basis. So even with a dedicated team working the region from 1 p.m. to midnight seven days a week, the numbers are increasing.
The highest level of police intervention in mental health crises is apprehension. Boucher said West Shore RCMP apprehended 355 persons in 2019-20 and 314 in 2020-21.
Each apprehension takes an officer off patrol for several hours. The people are commonly taken to Royal Jubilee Hospital and police have to stay until the patient is seen by a doctor. “Often officers must wait hours with a patient until a physician is available,” Boucher told MLAs. “Routinely wait times are more than two hours. One officer spent six hours.”
An earlier brief from the Victoria Esquimalt Police Board said Victoria police apprehended 676 people under the Mental Health Act in 2020 and delivered them to Royal Jubilee Hospital for psychiatric evaluation. The cumulative wait time was 1,000 hours.
Boucher said a multi-ministry collaborative approach to managing mental health issues would be more effective.
Every police department has the same story.
RCMP Supt. Kara Triance, in charge of the Kelowna detachment, said they deal with serious substance abuse and mental health calls every day.
“We’re attending significantly more calls for service every year, specifically responding to social and health issues.”
Triance also noted what flows from many of those calls. To put it briefly: Not much.
“The courts are not holding people in jail to the same degree as in the recent past, charges are not being approved as often, and increased demands are placed on the police to manage offenders at large in our communities,” she said.
“The result is that the courts are relying on our health systems to address criminality in our community without the structures in place yet to provide adequate care.”
RCMP Chief Supt. Jeanette Theisen confirmed at an earlier appearance before the committee that the problem is province-wide.
Theisen said mental health-related calls increased by nine per cent in two years up to 2020. There were 69,500 such calls last year, and more than 14,000 people were apprehended under the Mental Health Act.
Summing up, Triance told MLAs: “There’s a growing perception that there is an inability for police or health to adequately respond to crime … associated with the social issues. It’s breeding decreased confidence and growing frustrations. Demands on local police and municipalities are increasing, neither of which have the scope or mandate to address the underlying issues.”
It’s going to take a lot more than amending the Police Act to get to the root of this.
