Chief Larkin, I'll take a quick run at this and pass it on to you.
You're absolutely right. I need to clarify that quite often what we see is that mental health calls for service are interwoven with other social disorders or criminal activity, so they are sort of inherent in relation to other dominant calls for service. They represent, for me in a four-year period, a 30% increase. As I mentioned to you, we have 18 mental health apprehensions a day, on average, here in Peel Region.
What we have seen is an increase, and we've talked about the policy changes from the 1990s, which saw a lot of psychiatric facilities close. We've seen the saturation of mental health crisis in the community.
Policing institutions have been, for quite some time, seeking progressive opportunities. We have crisis outreach officers, plainclothes officers with mental health professionals and also uniformed officers with crisis response individuals. This exists pretty much right across the GTA, if not the province, with even pre-charge mental health programming and training with crisis negotiators. There are a variety of initiatives, but what you can see in this whole scenario, Mr. Shipley, is that it's still the police trying to find a way to insert mental health crisis response within our paradigm.
Instead of dispatching an officer to a crisis call, the idea—and I know it's being piloted in other mechanisms—is to look at how, at a previous point of triage, before it even gets to our doorstep, we can get it to the appropriate service, such as a crisis worker in the 911 communications centre, and divert it to an alternate service delivery. As you both know, agencies such as CMHA and our not-for-profits are also asking for more resourcing, since they are underserviced.
Chief Larkin, perhaps you have something to add.