Groups call to end deploying police for wellness checks
CBC News | Posted: March 8, 2025 10:00 AM | Last Updated: March 8
2 people experiencing mental health crises died in a span of less than a week in Halifax in February
Three prison advocacy organizations want police deployments for mental wellness checks to end after the deaths of two men in police custody in the span of less than a week last month in Halifax.
In both cases, the men — who were experiencing mental health distress — were Tasered after allegedly becoming aggressive with responding officers. Nova Scotia's police watchdog, the Serious Incident Response Team, is investigating both incidents.
The East Coast Prison Justice Society, PATH Legal and the Elizabeth Fry Society of Mainland Nova Scotia say a civilian crisis response team would be a better option in such cases. Halifax Regional Municipality is aiming to launch a pilot project this year.
"A program that prioritizes civilian response simply means that rather than dispatching the police, we dispatch trained professionals and crisis support workers who are available to respond to a whole bunch of situations," Jamie Livingston, a criminology professor at Saint Mary's University in Halifax, told CBC's Mainstreet Halifax on Friday.
He said those workers, after taking care of a person's "self-identified needs," could then offer followup support and referrals to available community services.
"It's really important to provide a non-police option for people who require care."
Civilian response option
Livingston said research shows a civilian response option would be less costly and more effective than police. He said that would also be the preference of people dealing with mental health distress and substance use.
"I conducted a survey last year involving people who live with mental health and substance use services here in Nova Scotia asking them if you were in crisis, what would you like to see? And they would like to see not the police," Livingston said.
More than 200 communities in North America provide options to call for help involving civilians rather than police, he said. He pointed to the Toronto Community Crisis Service and Anchor in Ottawa as two Canadian examples.
El Jones, who co-authored a 2022 report called Defunding the Police: Defining the Way Forward for HRM, said police shouldn't be responding for mental wellness checks.
"Halifax has been saying for some time now that we are in the process of implementing civilian teams. Twenty years ago, when we got mobile health crisis [services], that was actually the cutting edge. We were one of the leading cities in terms of implementing mental health responses. And since then … we've been surpassed by virtually every other jurisdiction," Jones said.
"We continue to do what has been proven to not work in this slow-moving process. We've had some assurances, some indications that this is developing, but we haven't had real transparency around what's happening, real timelines, any urgency around something that is taking the lives of our community members."
Increasing the stigma
Jones, who was scheduled to participate in a march Friday night in Halifax to demand police be taken off wellness checks, said when mental health is treated as a criminal issue, a public safety issue or a policing issue, it ends up increasing the stigma of mental health.
"That trickles down to everybody, not those only in crisis, but everybody who may feel a reluctance to seek help or get therapy or reach out because of the way that we treat mental health as criminal, those who suffer from mental health struggles as violent, the suggestion that you're a risk to society. These narratives impact everybody," Jones said.
Both Halifax Regional Police and Halifax RCMP have spoken in support of more civilian-led teams to better serve people and help free up officers for police duties.
In a statement earlier this week, Halifax Regional Police spokesperson Const. Martin Cromwell said police partner with the Mental Health Mobile Crisis Team, an initiative with Nova Scotia Health and the IWK, "that pairs a police officer with a mental health clinician to proactively address mental health issues in the community as an early intervention."
"We recognize there is more work to do, and we look forward to further discussions," Cromwell added.
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