Vern White worked in policing for more than 30 years, including as an Assistant Commissioner with the RCMP and as Ottawa Police Chief, and served as a Senator for 10 years.

With the community’s mental health worsening over time, Canada has inadvertently tasked its police with a job they should not be asked to do.

We have seen dramatic changes in policing over the past two decades. But unlike past periods of transformation, this has not come from changes in legislation or court decisions that affect the scope or management of policing. This time, it is expectation from the public for better policing that has demanded change.

It has certainly had an effect on the way policing is provided, and without intervention, some would argue could or has set up policing to fail. There is growing pressure being placed on police to focus not on traditional police work, like investigating organized crime and protecting order in the community. Instead, police are increasingly called upon to perform what are essentially mental health care interventions.

More than a law enforcement agency, policing has become responsible for addressing widespread societal challenges that law enforcement agencies are not readily equipped to handle. For decades now, the mental health system has been unable to meet this growing demand for care. Our country’s collective response has failed to build enough capacity or capability to manage risks and deal with this demand.

Brought about by a shift in mental health care from institutionalization to community-based models, people experiencing mental illness now encounter police much more regularly. When this happens, things don’t always go well. The fact that Canada continues to identify these encounters as caused by the execution of the police response, rather than by a deeper division of labour problems, is causing massive issues.

As overall mental ill-health proliferates, police providing first responses to mental health crises will proliferate too. Reporting on the issue has seen growth with specific age groups, particularly younger people, but as well in our Indigenous communities. We know and have seen that police are responding to large numbers of mental health calls, and that officers most often don’t have the time or training to manage this in a way that is respectful of the caller and the problem.

For those who argue that police forces simply need to better train the police to manage this challenge, the stark reality is that this is a poor use of police resources. An officer should not be expected to be a policing and security professional and a mental health professional at the same time. 

Trained mental health experts with strong knowledge and experience should be the ones on the front line. Not that more training wouldn’t be helpful – it is always helpful – but having mental health professionals dedicated to mental illness is the right response to the problem.

A recent book published in Canada, The Wicked Problems of Police Reform in Canada, looks at this specifically, and argues that a use of police resources to meet a problem that is health-related, rather than crime-related, is negatively impacting both patients and law enforcement. It goes on to say that managing mental illness at the community level has become one of the wicked problems facing policing.

So, I would argue, this problem is not only being handled by the wrong professionals, but it further distracts from policing’s core work of public safety. This is because police feel the need to protect their status in the community and deal with the negativity directed toward them for the way these situations are often handled. 

In essence having the police become the primary or one of the primary respondents to mental illness is not only unhelpful for those afflicted but as well for the service agency, policing.

While some mental health crises would fall into the category of endangering public safety, the vast majority would not. Because we have failed to explicitly ask what police should actually do, we have inadvertently tasked them with a large responsibility for one of the most difficult tasks in health care, mental health crisis response. 

The truly wicked problem emerges when police are blamed for the job they do when handling these situations, but then nothing is done to address the root causes of the issue. Police have called for increased mental health resources to deal with this, and they must be listened to.

If we want to see an effective response to the growing issue of mental health, the most important thing isn’t to ‘better train’ police. While this is an admirable goal in general and may provide some benefits, policymakers need to address the systemic problem beneath police response issues. They need to invest in training many more frontline mental health professionals and increase the capacity and capability of those currently in the health system.

Continuing to approach this problem in the same way into the future will only ever address its symptoms, leaving the disease that causes them untreated.

Of course, reform would not totally remove the police from mental health crisis response – and nor should it, as police are often required to support and protect professionals engaged in this work.

Police reform that puts officers firmly in this supporting role, rather than asking them to lead the response to a huge range of complex mental health challenges, will ultimately make our country safer and a healthier place.

Vern White worked in policing for more than 30 years, including as an Assistant Commissioner with the RCMP and as Ottawa Police Chief, and served as a Senator for 10 years.