Good morning. Greetings from Vancouver. The sun is just coming up in the city right now.
Greetings on behalf of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, which I'm very proud to represent and head.
My understanding is that this morning a number of topics are going to be discussed, but that I am to talk about mentally ill offenders and policing. In Vancouver, the calls we deal with that involve people with a mental disorder are a significant problem.
We've been talking about this since 2008, when we released a report. The title of that report pretty much described the problem. It's called “Lost in Transition: How a Lack of Capacity in the Mental Health System is Failing Vancouver's Mentally Ill and Draining Police Resources”.
We researched the issue of how many calls we deal with involving people with a mental disorder. City-wide, up to 30% fit into that category. In certain areas of the city, they are up to half of the calls. When I say “certain areas”, that includes the downtown eastside, which is the lowest-income part of Vancouver, where we have the most drug addiction.
To give you an example of how many mentally ill people we're dealing with, and how it has changed even in the last 10 years, we do something called a Mental Health Act apprehension. If someone is a danger to themselves or others and is suffering from an apparent mental disorder, we call that a section 28 apprehension. In 2002 we were doing about 1.5 per day. In 2012, when we looked at our stats, we were doing about seven per day. That's a fivefold increase in the number of people we're taking into care to see a doctor because they're suffering from a mental disorder and they're a danger.
What has caused all of this?
One thing is that we've had deinstitutionalization. While that was fine for some people, it's our belief that it went too far. There are many people who are now in the community and cannot cope on their own. For one thing, supports that were promised to support these people in the community never materialized, and some people just can't cope without being in custodial care.
For example, when Riverview, the local health facility that cared for the mentally ill, closed and people ended up out in the streets, a lot of them went to the lowest-income parts of the region, which includes Vancouver's notorious downtown eastside.
There, of course, the first person they meet is their friendly neighbourhood drug dealer. Now we have someone who is mentally ill and addicted to illicit drugs. Because they don't have the ability to hold a job or function, a lot of them end up as homeless people, so you have those three problems to try to deal with. Not only do the people who were deinstitutionalized gravitate to areas like the downtown eastside, but also a lot of young people do when they have problems, and they can become addicted quite easily.
In terms of recent violence—I'll talk about that and conclude with what we're going to do about the problem of the mentally ill in Vancouver—we've been tracking 35 incidents since 2012, at the beginning. These involve death and serious injury. Most of these incidents involve males. About 90% of these situations involve males who either were released from hospital or were apprehended under section 28. I'll give you some recent examples.
In October, a man who was severely disturbed rode our Canada Line to the last stop in downtown Vancouver, got out, and with a gun in his hand, decided to barricade himself in the lobby of a very luxurious Vancouver hotel, scaring the staff and guests. There was a 12-hour standoff with that person. He ended up being taken into custody after being shot with a rubber bullet and is now in psychiatric care.
In December, a man who who was emotionally disturbed arrived from Edmonton. He said to the police officers who he encountered in the street, “Please take me to the hospital. I don't feel right.” They took him to the psychiatric ward of a local hospital. I guess nothing was done for him, and he was back on the streets. He then attacked three elderly women right outside the hockey rink. He just randomly walked up to them and started striking their heads against the pavement. A fourth woman was potentially a victim of a carjacking, but the police arrived and arrested him.
In February, in a downtown apartment building, a person who was here from France and had been in the hospital system went berserk and attacked seven people in the building with a knife and a hammer, causing very severe injuries. He attacked the police officer who tried to arrest him.
To give a couple of other quick examples, in February, again near the hockey rink downtown, a man stabbed three people, including a woman who was walking her dog. Then he laid down on the ground and started yelling and screaming. When the police officers arrived, they thought he was a victim of a stabbing because he had blood on him and was lying on the ground, but he was clearly mentally ill.
The last incident was in a 7-Eleven just last month. In the early morning hours a woman was waiting for the cashier when buying something, and a man who had just finished serving a five-year sentence for aggravated assault and had been under psychiatric care by the correction system went berserk again and stabbed her in the head with a chip of the knife breaking off in her skull.
Fortunately, all these victims survived, but there could have been much more tragic consequences.
Let me conclude by just saying what we're doing about it in Vancouver. This has created lots of calls and workload for Vancouver police officers. We've been trying to address the upstream drivers by talking to our partners in the health system, saying, “You need to do more. You can't just let people who have an inability to function out on the streets”.
We've talked to our officers and we've explained how serious this problem is, but we've also said that it's mandatory that each front-line officer undertake a crisis intervention training program. It's a week-long program. We bring in psychiatric experts. We bring in mental health professionals. Our goal is to de-escalate situations. We don't want to use force. We don't want to criminalize the mentally ill, and we're trying to resolve these incidents with dialogue and other tools we can use to de-escalate.
For about 30 years now in Vancouver we've had a full-time unit called Car 87, which has a psychiatric nurse and a police officer. They take calls from both the police and the health system and they deal with lots of people who have issues.
Since the beginning of 2012 we've partnered with our local health authority on what is called ACT, assertive community treatment. I mentioned before that a lot of people end up in the community without support. This program does try to give those people support. The term “assertive” is in there because sometimes somebody who is not well mentally may say, “I'm feeling better today. I'm not going to take my medication”. One of the goals of this team is to make sure that people are taking their medication because, if they're not, they will perhaps be a danger to themselves or others.
We are going to expand the ACT program. It's been a good model and is used elsewhere in North American and in the city of Victoria as well. Also, the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police are going to convene a national conference to talk about this. I've also talked to Senator Vern White, who is considering a study on this as well.
But a lot of the calls we're dealing with in the city of Vancouver involve those with a mental disorder, and it's creating a lot of work for our front-line officers.
That's my opening statement.