Policing mental health: The composition and perceived challenges of Co-response Teams and Crisis Intervention Teams in the Canadian context

ABSTRACT

Due to an increase in interactions between the police and persons with perceived mental illness (PwPMI), police services have begun deploying specialized crisis responses to more adequately address these calls. One such response is a Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) that is comprised of frontline officers who are specially trained on mental health; another is a Co-Response Team (CRT) where an officer is paired with a mental health practitioner. With police services presumably shifting scarce resources to deploy these responses, it is paramount to understand the challenges they may endure. With little Canadian research on these responses to-date, the purpose of this paper is to document which Canadian police services deploy these responses and how their composition varies by jurisdiction, as well as their perceived challenges. Through a mixed methodological approach, the results indicate that most of the participating services deploy varying compositions of a CIT and/or CRT, but are perceived to endure a variety of challenges which may impede the overall success of these responses. A call for future research is made which may assist Canadian police services in addressing some of the identified challenges.

KEYWORDS:

• Policing
• mental health
• persons with perceived mental illness (PwPMI)
• Co-Response Team (CRT)
• Crisis Intervention Team (CIT)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The literature on mental health-related police interactions employs a variety of terms to refer to such interactions, with ‘persons with mental illness’ being among the most frequently used terms. As Frederick et al. (2018) note, among other issues, the use of this (and related) terms may lead to validity-related issues due to the uncertainty of whether the so-called ‘person with mental illness’ genuinely lives with a diagnosed or diagnosable mental illness, or if other issues may be at play. Within police data, mental health calls are most frequently coded as such by responding officers due to a perception or belief – on behalf of the officer, bystanders, etc. – that mental health-related issues may be present, as opposed to a certainty that they are present. This paper, therefore, employs the term ‘persons with perceived mental illness’ (PwPMI) to reflect this uncertainty.

2. We mention ‘effectiveness’ with a word of caution. Various reviews have concluded that this body of research is still developing, and that there is insufficient evidence to establish whether these responses are truly ‘evidence-based’ (see Amy C. Watson et al., 2017; Bird & Shemilt, 2019; Dewa et al., 2018; Puntis et al., 2018; Shapiro et al., 2015; Taheri, 2016).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jacek Koziarski

Jacek Koziarski is a PhD Student in the Sociology Department at the University of Western Ontario, and a Research Associate for the Canadian Society of Evidence-Based Policing (CAN-SEBP). Jacek has a broad interest in policing research and developing evidence-based approaches to policing, but his most recent work has specifically examined police responses to persons with perceived mental illness, policing cybercrime, and resistance toward evidence-based policing. Beyond policing, Jacek is also interested in exploring the spatiotemporal patterns of crime and non-crime-related issues..

Christopher O’Connor

Dr. Christopher O’Connor received his PhD in Sociology from the University of Calgary where he studied school-to-work transitions and perceptions of crime in the boomtown of Fort McMurray, Alberta. He completed his master’s degree in Sociology and his Bachelor of Arts Honours degree in Criminology and Criminal Justice at Carleton University. Prior to joining Ontario Tech University, Dr. O’Connor was an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Wisconsin—Superior.

Tyler Frederick

Dr. Tyler Frederick earned his PhD in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto, with a focus on crime and deviance and gender. He did his postdoctoral work at the Toronto Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.