Adam: Ottawa’s soon-to-exist mental-health crisis team can’t come soon enough

City council has done the right thing by approving a 24-hour mental-health hotline and a mobile crisis response team to serve people in distress.

Published Jul 20, 2023 • Last updated 2 hours ago • 3 minute read

October, 2020: The Justice for Abdirahman Abdi Coalition speaks during a rally at Confederation Park in Ottawa. Photo by Jean Levac /Postmedia News

Ottawa is not a hotbed of police shootings of people in mental health distress, though a couple of past incidents show the city has had its moments.

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In fact, it was the 2016 death of Abdirahman Abdi in the hands of Ottawa police, and the shooting death of Greg Ritchie in 2019, that triggered community demand to divert mental-health distress calls away from the police to a team of health professionals trained in crisis care. Both Abdi, a Black man, and Ritchie, an Ojibwe man, were suffering from mental-health problems when they died.

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Now, seven years after Abdi’s death, the City of Ottawa has finally done the right thing by approving a 24-hour mental-health hotline and a mobile crisis response team to serve people in distress. We can all heave a sigh of relief. The plan, which will kick off with one-time funding of $2.5 million, goes into operation in about a year to allow for the hiring, training and establishment of operational protocols.

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Hopefully, this change will bring us to the day when police are no longer first responders when someone has a mental-health breakdown and needs help. Toronto already has a program up and running, and one hopes staff here will learn and get the new plan going much more quickly.

“We desperately need alternative mental-health response because in many cases, the person you want to call is not police because behaviour is not necessarily criminal,” Somerset Coun. Ariel Troster said.

That’s what is so sad about the spate of shootings of people in mental-health distress across Canada and North America. Most of these people, who are often a danger to themselves, need care but end up being shot. Quite often, family members who call police for help are left blaming themselves for the loss of a loved one.

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Police have faced criticism in these tragic situations because they have shot people in mental-health distress. But in fairness to them, they are not trained for the task of dealing with these people, even though they are the ones we call in times of crisis. Over time, police forces have also come to realize that they are not suited for the job, and their leaders have recognized the need to remove officers from the front lines of mental-health response and let other agencies take over.

For instance, the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police has for a long time demanded the police role in mental-health responses be reduced. “We went from the agency of last resort to the mental health agency of first resort … And that is wrong” the association said as far back as 2013. In 2021, then-chief Peter Sloly pleaded with council to act. “We are very much in favour of other agencies taking on some significant portion of the demand that has been placed on the police service,” he said. “For whatever combination of reasons, this city has not moved forward substantially on it. We are begging for it. Just do it.”

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Now that the city has acted, let’s hope it remains serious and committed to the idea. Details of how this will work — who will make up the teams, what role the police will play, what other number to call in addition to 911 in an emergency — will be ironed out in consultations and discussions.

But the more important issue is how to ensure the three-year pilot project gets steady, sustainable funding going forward. The one-time $2.5 million from the city will only go so far.

There has been controversy in the past about how to fund such an initiative, with some suggesting the money should come from the police budget, while others think it should be the city’s responsibility. Wherever the funding comes from, its source must be established fairly quickly and locked in. This is too important an issue to be caught up in perpetual budget wars between the police services board and the city.

Mohammed Adam is an Ottawa journalist and commentator.