Yes, I'd be happy to. Thank you.
A few years ago, I did lead the Office of Indigenization at the Justice Institute of British Columbia, which is responsible for training every municipal police officer in the province of British Columbia. During my time there, I did have the opportunity to support the development of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation community safety officer program. That program has received a lot of media attention and has been really positively received in the community. I'm not only seeing a sharp reduction in the calls for police officers. It's also building positive relationships and attending to a lot of the cultural stuff that I've been talking about.
Those officers are not police officers. They're community safety officers. However, when we were building the curriculum for that program, we asked, “What are the needs in this community?” and said, “Well, we know that this community is struggling with mental health challenges. We know that this needs to be de-escalated through a particular means.” When I think about the 7,000 unique individuals who we support ever year in the city of Toronto at Native Child and Family Services of Toronto, I know that many of them have had very negative impacts with policing.
I referred to a study in my testimonial earlier. It was a study that was done out of the States, but it really showed that about $8 billion is spent every year in the States on police training, and that training has not been shown to change behaviour in officers. Training in itself is something that does not work unless it's deployed with a number of other structural changes.
We've been working on a pilot at Native Child, in collaboration with the community and partners here, to look at what it would be like to have safety officers who are specialized in victim services and mental health be first responders to be able to work with and de-escalate some of the situations that often go wrong with police. We do know that police will need to be involved some of the time, but I do think that we could take a number of these cases off the hands of the Toronto Police Service. What that does, as well, is free up officers for more critical tasks that they often struggle to find time to address.
I think it's supporting police officers to really focus on the things they do well, while also making room for community-led solutions that we know lead to better results.