New strategic plan from Sudbury Police to focus on mental health

Mental health will be a bigger focus for the Greater Sudbury Police Service in the coming years.

Police Chief Paul Pedersen presented the new four-year strategic plan to the Police Services Board during Monday's meeting and he says one of the biggest changes coming to the plan, will be the focus on mental health.

"Acronyms like PTSD and OSI, occupational stress injuries, is language that just a few short years ago wasn't talked about openly in our profession and certainly wasn't part of the way that we conducted business," he said.

"Now we know that in order for our members to help the public, which is their core business, we have to make sure that we're helping them first and that's the big focus."

Learning how to connect with the public in different ways is an important change to the plan.

"Really getting strategic with respect to how we're deploying our resources, where the workload is going... we know the public is connecting through mobile devices for every kind of business and maybe we need to mirror that," Pedersen said. 

Different advisory committees help teach police the best ways to connect with the different communities such as Indigenous, LGBTQ and youth and social media is becoming more and more important to help connect to the different communities.

"You're seeing millions and millions of imprints on social media and that's people that are connecting with us that just a few short years ago might not have even connected with their police department at all," he said.

Updated drug strategy

The drug problems in the city are changing, Pedersen said. A few years ago when the last strategic plan was created, there was no mention of an opioid crisis, because no one knew it was going to happen.

And there are areas of the city, such as the downtown core, that people have specifically been asking for more officer presence in.

To help alleviate residents' and business owners' concerns, Greater Sudbury Police will be also be hiring four new officers. The process of recruiting and getting new officers trained starts now, Pedersen said, and once they are trained they will be heading to the areas where the community is requesting them.

"Loud and clear from the community that we serve, we heard that they want to see more officer presence downtown," he said.

The new plan will reflect the changing atmosphere around drugs in Greater Sudbury and in the downtown core of the city.

"We look at those with addictions as needing harm reduction support and then we look at those that are dealing those deadly opioids as ones that we go after with enforcement strategies," Pedersen said. 

He said addictions, mental health and homelessness are not best dealt with through the judicial system.