I am Inspector Patrick Roy, manager of the Équipe mobile d'intervention psychosociale, the mobile psychosocial intervention team, or ÉMIP. I am accompanied by Sergeant Éric Roger, field supervising sergeant on the same team.
The work of our intervention team in the field is more related to mental health than to systemic racism. Of course, there may be some overlap on the street when police are involved, but our presentation is, in essence, about mental health.
Our organization has some 300 employees for a population of 170,000 people. We are located one hour and 15 minutes from Montreal. In 2015, like all police organizations in Quebec and across Canada, I imagine, we had to deal with an emerging mental health-related phenomenon in the field. Police officers had to face this, even though they were neither mental health experts nor social workers.
At the same time, the Centre intégré universitaire de santé et de services sociaux de l'Estrie also noticed the emergence of a problematic situation on the streets. In 2015, we therefore decided to unite the forces of the police service and the hospital in order to create a joint unit in each patrol vehicle, that is to say a police patrol officer and a social worker.
We were inspired by the model that already existed at the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal at the time, namely the Équipe de soutien aux urgences psychosociales, ÉSUP, the psychosocial emergency support team. In 2015, our project got under way. You should know that in 2015, our patrollers were each spending seven hours a day on the streets to deal with mental health management. At that time, this tool became a must.
In 2016, the mobile outreach team was made up of a joint social worker and police patrol officer, operating two nights a week. As this initiative proved successful, in 2017 the presence of the mixed team was increased to three nights a week, and in 2018, to four nights a week. In 2018, our organization realized that our police officers were shifting from 7 to 14 work hours per day spent on mental health management, despite the team in the field.
In 2018, we were answering approximately 1,400 mental health-related calls per year; our mixed team on four nights a week answered 263 of those calls. That's when we decided, once again, to make a major organizational shift and appoint five police officers, five full-time resources, to manage mental health, seven days a week, seven nights a week. The social workers are still with us four nights a week. The rest of the time and slots are filled by police officers who have become mental health specialists rather than generalists.
The mission of the joint team and our police officers is simple: to promote multidisciplinary collaboration and support police work when dealing with people in crisis or whose mental state is disrupted, in order to facilitate their access to adapted services, whether in the areas of justice, health or community support.
Once our five resources were appointed, we established their roles and responsibilities. They are not social workers, and the leadership for health is not with the police service; it is with health. Whether we are talking about a police officer, a social worker, a doctor, or you in your families, we have to recognize that the number of people with mental health problems is increasing and we need to treat them. These people are not suspects to the police community; they are individuals. They become people, men and women, whom we need to guide rather than send to the judicial system. Prosecution is not necessarily the best tool.
Therefore, the role of these police officers, these five permanent police officers, is to support the generalist patrol officers in the application of laws and regulations related to persons whose mental state is disturbed; to take ownership and manage specific recurring cases; to analyze, plan and coordinate all requests for intervention related to treatment orders from the Commission d'examen des troubles mentaux or from various courts in Quebec, in order to proceed with the enforcement of orders, in collaboration with social workers.
Their role is also to support the management of runaways and missing persons with mental health problems; to support general police divisions in the field and the investigation of people who are homeless and suffering from mental health problems; to help police officers obtain requests for orders to bring people for care; to assist health services with complex cases within the territory of the City of Sherbrooke; to represent our organization by sitting on committees; and to publish follow-up reports tracking mental health.
The most important aspect of our organization is that these five officers participate in the development of our generalist police officers through coaching, mentoring, training and awareness.
I will now describe how an intervention proceeds from the moment we receive a call. We receive a call at the 911 emergency centre, and there is a confirmation that it is related to mental health. Our specialist police officers, accompanied by the social worker or not, travel with our generalist police officers to the indicated location. Once the situation is secured, the generalist police officers leave the premises and the specialist police officers take care of the follow-up and supervision of the individuals. Very often, the latter are not suspects.
In addition, these police specialists are trained in de-escalation and are familiar with communication strategies. They are trained in all types of mental health problems so that they can recognize them and then intervene. They also receive training on drugs and psychotic effects. They receive training from the range of health care providers and others, including mental health first aid, to help them target the type of intervention.
Finally, they take part in several committees, including a provincial mental health committee, a mental health-related committee and the regional strategic committee on homelessness. They are part of all focus groups.