On June 27, the City of Ottawa’s Community Services Committee approved a pilot project for an alternative mental health crisis response system that is supposed to be safer, especially for those in crisis. However, the Safer Alternatives for Mental Health and Substance Use Crises Response system won’t make anyone safer – it will lead to more people being killed.
The system was proposed by the Guiding Council and Mental and Addictions which was created by the Ottawa Police Service and the OPS is a member. When we and our community partners saw that, we immediately suspected that, with OPS influence, the Guiding Council would recommend an alternative mental health response system that did three things:
- Leave the door open to continue dangerous levels of police involvement;
- Wouldn’t involve taking any money from the police budget; and
- Would take a really long time to implement.
And all three have come true.
First, the Guiding Council’s terms of reference says it aims for a system that will still send cops, “when the crisis is linked to criminal activity”. Well, that would include a situation like Abdirahman Abdi, a Black man with mental health issues who died in 2016 following police intervention. People called the cops on him because he was allegedly touching women in a coffee shop. And it would also include a situation like Greg Ritchie, an Indigenous man with mental health issues who people called the cops on because they said they saw a man with a knife that turned out to be a ceremonial tomahawk. Abdi and Greg would end up just as dead under the system currently being proposed by the Guiding Council – despite the OPS agreeing to initiate a mental health response strategy as part of the settlement reached with Abdi’s family.
Second, not a cent of the $2.5 million estimated project cost will come from the police budget.
Furthermore, the City has tasked the police with seeking permanent funding for the program from other levels of government. That’s like if there was a security team in the mental health wing of a hospital that was killing people they were called to help so the hospital administration finally said, “Ok, ok. The people we send you to help keep ending up dead so we’re going to give that job to a new temporary team. But don’t worry – we’re going to keep paying you anyway…and, oh, can you ask other levels of governments for funding for a permanent program?”
And third, it took the Guiding Council two years to get to this point despite community-led efforts producing a report containing a complete template for a non-police mental health crisis response system in May 2021. However, the report the Guiding Council presented to City Council – including the literature review – didn’t mention the report that the 613-819 Black Hub and Vivic Research published in June 2021 laying out a template for a system very similar to the Guiding Council’s proposal, but with one big difference: the Hub’s report recommended the absolute minimum police involvement in the new system.
Adding to these concerns is the fact that the Guiding Council developed the plan for the three-year pilot project with little transparency, including not holding their meetings publicly or making their meeting minutes public. We got their meeting minutes through Freedom of Information and they revealed why the level of police involvement the Guiding Council is permitting in their new system is so dangerous.
The minutes included a story about an incident that happened while Guiding Council staff were interviewing Indigenous people in the market with an outreach worker from a local community group. The minutes said, “Two [Ottawa Police Service] members came into the group quite aggressively, and after a few minutes handcuffed an Indigenous man (most members of the group were Indigenous). [The outreach worker] advocated for the police to act appropriately and was himself arrested for obstruction.”
It’s unclear how the current Guiding Council members were chosen but it’s telling that it doesn’t include any of the groups that are the strongest critics of the Ottawa Police Service…like the 613-819 Black Hub, Horizon Ottawa, the Coalition Against More Surveillance, the Criminalization and Punishment Education Project, the Ottawa Black Diaspora Coalition, the Asilu Collective or Justice for Abdirahman.
If the City really wants to help people experiencing mental health crises, instead of continuing to contribute to them being harmed or killed, it will send the pilot project back for revision with an expanded Guiding Council that includes truly grassroots voices.