Ontario has added a three-day course on responding to mental-health crises to its basic constable curriculum, the first time prospective officers will receive dedicated training on how to deal with people in distress.
Before now, the province’s basic constable training did not include any sessions specifically focused on responding to people in mental-health crises, with the Ontario Police College instead folding it into material on topics such as officer safety, according to an outline of the curriculum obtained by The Globe and Mail through a freedom of information request.
The new dedicated session, announced in April, follows years of debate about the role of police in responding to mental-health crises and as major cities across the province are declaring mental-health and homelessness emergencies.
But experts say devoting three days, or 18 hours, of training to mental health – just 4 per cent of the curriculum – is not enough, given the realities of policing and the high proportion of calls that involve mental illness.
“Whether you like it or not, you’re a social worker, a psychologist, a mental-health counsellor. You’re a first responder to people in crisis – a lot of whom have mental-health issues,” Curt Taylor Griffiths, a criminology professor at Simon Fraser University, says of an officer’s role today.
“The curriculum should be built around what police officers today are actually asked to do. And then you work backwards from that and build the training.”
Roughly 1,350 recruits a year attend the program at the college in Aylmer, Ont., one of the largest such training facilities in North America. The program is required for all new police officers in Ontario.
The curriculum outline obtained by The Globe, which is dated November, 2022, shows that issues related to mental health were covered at that time as part of sessions on provincial laws such as the Mental Health Act, or officer safety and defensive tactics.
Andrew Morrison, a spokesperson with the Ministry of the Solicitor General, said in an e-mail that the curriculum is “reviewed continuously,” and that the new mental-health module was developed in consultation with a wide range of stakeholders and addresses recommendations from coroner’s inquests and the provincial ombudsman.
He said recruits will be assessed ”to demonstrate competency through de-escalation and communication strategies, mental health awareness, empathy, and cultural safety in responding to citizens in mental health crises.”
Jennifer Chambers, executive director of the Empowerment Council, a mental-health advocacy group funded by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), said she is “cautiously optimistic” about the bolstered training, which has until now been “woefully inadequate.”
Ms. Chambers said teaching about mental health through the lens of officer safety or defensive tactics “is a pretty negative way to portray people with mental-health issues; with the assumption that they’re always going to be somebody who poses a risk to officers.”
Advocates have long called for a reallocation of police spending toward social and community services – and for mental-health calls to be diverted away from police altogether.
Rachel Bromberg, a law student and executive director of the International Crisis Response Association, which supports municipalities across Canada and the U.S. in developing non-police crisis-response services, cautioned that more training is not a panacea.
“Even the best police training in the world is not going to make police amazing responders to situations that are diametrically opposed to most of the situations that they’re tasked with dealing with,” she said. “Mental health and crime are very different things.”
Toronto launched the country’s first non-police, city-led alternative crisis-response service as a pilot project in March, 2022. Within the first six months, according to the city, the service – called the Toronto Community Crisis Service (TCCS) – received 2,489 unique calls, including 1,530 that were diverted from 911.
Mobile teams were dispatched in 84 per cent of cases. They requested police attendance in just 2.5 per cent of calls, and ambulance attendance in 1.7 per cent. The pilot project has since been recommended for citywide expansion.
But even with such a service, Ms. Bromberg said police will still be interacting with people with mental illness for a multitude of reasons, including that it is not always apparent to a 911 operator when an incident is related to mental health.
“Police are still going to be the primary responders, even in the best-case scenario, to a lot of these situations,” Ms. Bromberg said.
The curriculum outline obtained by The Globe breaks down 33 sessions into hours and units. The government says the full curriculum is not publicly available because of “safety and security” reasons.
The 10 longest sessions – each more than 10 hours – include traffic law, federal law, officer safety, defensive tactics, firearms, evidence, provincial law, police vehicle operations, physical fitness, and diversity and professional police practices (DIPP). Other shorter sessions cover intimate partner violence, community policing, drugs, leadership, ethics, human trafficking, extremist groups, motorcycle gangs, and officer wellness – through a course called “Road to Mental Readiness.”
Prof. Griffiths says the time allocated to each topic reflects what is being prioritized. For example, physical fitness is given 16.5 hours, while community policing is given 4.5 hours. Intimate partner violence is given nine hours, while defensive tactics are given 33 hours. Diversity and professional police practices is given 12 hours, while police vehicle operations are given 18 hours.
“They’re spending more hours getting ready to know how to march during their graduation ceremony than they are in community policing,” Prof. Griffiths said of the patrol model, which focuses on building relationships between officers and the communities they serve.
“Does this curriculum reflect what officers in Ontario are being asked to do – whether they should be asked to do it or not? I look at this and I say no.”
In addition to training in mental-health response, a three-day or 18-hour session was also added in April on “immediate rapid deployment and active attacker” training, extending the total program length from 60 to 66 days.
The expansion was recently announced by Premier Doug Ford as part of several changes designed to increase enrolment, along with eliminating tuition to the program – currently $15,450, including room and board – and eliminating a postsecondary education requirement. The province is also adding 70 spaces to each of the college’s three training cohorts – increasing the size of each class to 550 recruits – and plans to add a fourth cohort in 2024 to bring the number of annual graduates to 2,200.
Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, a professor of criminology at the University of Toronto, welcomes the addition of a three-day mental-health course, but he said it’s critical to know how these sessions are being evaluated.
“You have to demonstrate proficiency in using your firearm,” he said. “Do you have to demonstrate proficiency with respect to dealing with people suffering from mental-health problems?”
Prof. Owusu-Bempah believes the police curriculum needs to be shaped by public consultation and transparent evaluation to ensure it is effective.
“Without adequate evaluation of police practices – existing and new – we have little understanding of both their positive and negative impact, and that’s problematic,” he said. “Policies, practices, new training programs can have the opposite effect of what’s intended. They can literally do more damage if they are window dressing or surface level.”
Molly Hayes