Stop. Rewind. Replay.: Performance, police training and mental health crisis response

Abstract

Can performance be the means by which a ‘Use of Force‘ paradigm in police training is decentralized? Footage of lethal force encounters between police and individuals in mental health crisis is ceaselessly in the news cycle, dispersing eyewitness accounts to millions who watch the endless replay of these incidents on social media. In the replay of these incidents, spectators observe with bewilderment the missed opportunities, the alternative courses of action that seem so apparent to the outside eye–all that could have been done differently. What if officers themselves could hit rewind and replay on the lethal force encounter with an individual in mental health crisis? Can performance be a vehicle for embodied replay and repetition that generates and makes tacit new forms of bodily knowledge? When performance is made the operative framework in police training, it can set the stage for scenarios that seem reassuringly familiar. But in its high-fidelity repetition of the familiar, performance can de-realize patterns of recognition, altering the course of entrained decision-making to make alternative pathways towards peaceful resolution conceivable, actionable and possible. In this article, Alvarez examines the methodological implications of a four-year research study she conceived in 2016 and initiated in 2017 in Toronto, Canada to design and measure the efficacy of a scenario-based training programme to improve police response to individuals in mental health crisis, with co-investigators Dr Yasmine Kandil (University of Victoria) and Dr Jennifer Lavoie (Wilfrid Laurier University), and a national team of theatre makers; people with lived experience of mental illness; experts in communication, anti-discrimination and cultural safety curriculum design; community advocates; forensic psychologists; clinicians; and police trainers. The training is grounded in the belief that the deceptively familiar hypotheticals of scenario-based training can unsettle sedimented habits, stigmas, and assumptions and naturalize ways of knowing premised on procedural justice.

Notes

1 The inquests are, sadly, too numerous to cite here, but of particular importance for this study are the recommendations that emerged from the 2017 Andrew Loku inquest (Ministry of the Solicitor General 2017). See also the Ontario Ombudsman, Paul Dubé’s (2016) report; the Hon. Frank Iacobucci’s (2014) report; and the 2014 Mental Health Commission of Canada report authored by two of our collaborators, Drs Terry Coleman and Dorothy Cotton.

2 Procedural justice focuses on how to improve police response to persons in crisis by fostering person-centred policing, allowing the person in crisis to lead the problem-solving process, and prioritizing fair and transparent procedures. The rights, dignity and voice of the person in crisis is centralized in the approach. See Livingston et al. (2014), Watson and Angell (2007) and Tyler and Blader (2003).

3 I am invoking a broad definition of ‘use of force’ that most often includes the use of intermediate weapons (such as Tasers, batons and sock rounds) and physical, hands-on tactics.

4 For these observations, I am indebted to the work of our collaborators from San’yas Indigenous Cultural Safety Training in Ontario and British Columbia. See also ‘Deadly Force’, an investigation by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), which found that more than 460 people died in encounters with police from 2000 to 2017. The majority of those were in a state of mental-health crisis and Indigenous and Blacks populations were ‘overwhelmingly over-represented in these encounters’ (CBC database 2017).

5 See the forthcoming chapter by my co- investigator, Yasmine Kandil, ‘Tensions and ethics of engagement: Utilizing applied theatre in the context of police training’, which examines how our Forum Scenario turns Boal’s methodology ‘upside down’: Boal’s methodology was designed for vulnerable populations to become ‘spect-actors’ in the scene and discover ways to ‘speak back to oppression’. In the case of our Forum Scenarios, the officer becomes the spect-actor in order to ‘un-learn’ the role of the oppressor.

6 It is important to note the underlying stigmatizing attitude, here, which can skew officers' risk assessment, namely, that individuals living with mental illness are prone to violence. According to the 2014 General Social Survey on Canadians' Safety, individuals living with mental illness are more likely to be victimized by violence than to perpetrate violence. See Burczycka 2018.

7 Take, for example, the case of Clive Mensah, a 30-year-old Black man in mental-health crisis, who was fatally Tasered in the backyard of his Toronto- area home by Peel police on 20 November 2019, after reports of a ‘suspicious male causing a disturbance’ (cited in Nassar 2020). As a Black man, Mensah was especially vulnerable to police violence and a misattribution of ‘suspicious behaviour’ due to racial bias.