Public Safety Committee on April 23rd, 2013

[Chief Jim Chu]

I think information sharing is really important, especially for young people. In Vancouver that is a priority for us, with school liaison officers who deal with the education, with the social service, and also with health professionals in terms of a wraparound approach to preventing young people from getting into that life of crime.

[Rick Norlock, Conservative, Northumberland—Quinte West, ON]

Thank you.

Go ahead, Chief Blais.

[Chief Jean-Michel Blais]

Thank you very much, Mr. Norlock.

Unfortunately, I don't have the article with me here, but in The Globe and Mail in 2011, there was an article talking about the life of a young man who had gone from an abusive home through various stages of prevention care. He ended killing somebody at the age of 17.

The overall cost was estimated to be about $1.5 million to be able to deal with this individual up to the age of 21. Imagine if, at the front end, perhaps $100,000 had been spent on that individual and on dealing with some of the root causes of his criminality. We perhaps would have been able to avoid that $1.5 million outlay for that young individual.

As the other chiefs have mentioned, this is a question of investment. Whether it's in a rural or an urban area, it's investment that would have to be done, and in a concerted fashion.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

You have 10 seconds left.

[Rick Norlock, Conservative, Northumberland—Quinte West, ON]

Okay.

I guess the question is whose budget we take the $100,000 from to put it towards this other—

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Yes, and that's the question we'll have to discuss over the long period of time here.

We'll move to Mr. Scarpaleggia, please.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

Thank you, Chair.

Chief Hanson, you proposed the notion of safe jails, where drug treatment could be offered. You said that, in your opinion, there isn't a sufficient level of treatment in regular jails.

Perhaps you could just expand on that. Was that for drug addiction or for mental health issues in general?

[Chief Rick Hanson]

It's both, whether it's a provincial jail or a federal penitentiary. Any time you're in an environment where you have an hour a week that you can put your prisoner in to deal with an issue, and then back into the general population he goes, it's not going to work. You have to devote the facility to being.... It can still be run as a jail. They are still serving sentences. But it's been proven not to work in the major penitentiaries and the big jails.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

This notion of safe jails would be something between a prison for bad guys, if you want to put it that way, and a hospital. It would be somewhere in between the two. You would not be able to leave, you would be under a criminal conviction, but essentially you'd be in a care environment.

[Chief Rick Hanson]

It would be a secure detox facility.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

Yes.

Constable Chu, you were talking about incidents in Vancouver where mentally ill individuals had committed crimes. If they had committed crimes, would these individuals be classified as not criminally responsible? Is that the kind of mental illness we're talking about?

[Chief Jim Chu]

Some of them might be. The standard for “not guilty by reason of a mental disorder” is quite high. A lot of them are in psychiatric remand right now being assessed for the suitability of the sentence, to see if they understand the nature of a trial.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

In some cases it was people who should be taking medication, but they're not. Then you alluded to the fact that the community health services, or somebody, I don't know if it's the police, should be more proactive in ensuring that people who need medication are in fact taking it.

Could you elaborate on that?

[Chief Jim Chu]

If somebody's in the community and they're suffering from a medical issue such as diabetes, they know they need to take their medication to be better and to live. But somebody who's mentally ill in the community, perhaps taking medication for his mental illness, may one day think he's feeling fine and doesn't need to take the medication. Next thing you know, he devolves into something that tends to be considered dangerous behaviour. That's obviously what's happened. But then once they're back on the medication, they understand what's been happening.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

Sure, they're back on the medication. These are people who are going freely about. They're not in an institutionalized setting.

You seemed to suggest that there is something that could be done through community policing or the police working with health professionals to remind or somehow encourage people to take their medications. That's what I was hoping you could elaborate on.

[Chief Jim Chu]

There's a concept called assertive community treatment teams. Right now there's a police officer that's part of a group of people, including mental health professionals. They'll have a caseload. One team of perhaps 12 professionals will deal with 100 people on their caseloads and actively monitor these individuals to make sure they're functioning, taking their medication, and not developing problems that require them to be taken into care. The concept there, really, is based on the assertive model of community care.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

Chief Hanson, you mentioned that the rate of attack—someone attacking another individual, either killing them or hurting them or intending to hurt them—has remained constant over time. Yet, the proportion of this group, what you called the “bad guys”, has dropped, and it's been made up by an increase in assaults by those who are mentally ill in some way.

Did I understand you correctly? Was that what you said?

[Chief Rick Hanson]

If you look at rates of attack against persons, the rates today per 100,000 are the same as they were 25 to 30 years ago.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

But within that group of people committing attacks, the portion of those who don't have a mental health issue, who perhaps have some kind of anti-social issue but not a mental health issue, has dropped.

Is that what you are saying?

[Chief Rick Hanson]

I can't say that because we didn't really track that 25 or 30 years ago.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

Oh, I see. Okay.

[Chief Rick Hanson]

But what we can say is that the number of mentally ill people—now they've diagnosed those who are in prisons and jails as having anti-social personality disorder—makes up about 80% of the population.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

Yes, I see. It's really a diagnosis issue.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Your time is up.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

I'm done, okay.

Thank you.