Police join more than dozen social agencies to improve lives of Edmonton’s most vulnerable

EDMONTON – Police shed light on a new project Friday, which they hope will end a “cycle of despair” affecting some of our city’s homeless suffering from mental health issues.

“What’s happening now is they’re bumping around the health and justice systems. On one hand, it’s incurring incredible costs to those systems. But more importantly, it’s not solving the problem; it’s not serving those individuals well,” explained Jay Freeman, Executive Director of Edmonton Homeless

Freeman said that in extreme cases, the police and health care costs for one individual cycling through the system can reach almost $190,000.

“And the really frustrating part of that is, at the end of that, he’s still homeless.”

“There’s hundreds of hours that are expended to deal with one individual, if we’re just cycling them through,” said Edmonton police chief, Rod Knecht. “There’s a cost benefit to this by getting this person to a better place where they’re getting the help as opposed to just processing them, and processing them, and processing them.”

That’s where the Heavy Users of Service initiative comes in. Police – along with social service providers, first responders, justice, aboriginal and government representatives – will work to identify the people they deal with the most, and look at how the system is failing them in order to fix the problem.

Among the issues: getting at-risk individuals to a family doctor, instead of visiting the emergency room on a regular basis.

So far, officials say a big barrier they’ve been trying to overcome is sharing information. The program is already making strides, though.

“We’ve started with a dozen individuals and nine of those 12 have already given us approval to share their information,” said Freeman. “I think if that trust is there, and they realize we’re only interested in that information so we can better serve them, the vast majority are going to be willing to share that information.”

There are hopes to expand the program to 50 individuals next year, and to continue it until the end of 2014. Knecht is optimistic that the program will generate plenty of success stories.

“I think we’ll see people linked up to their families,” he said, “we’ll see them get the care they need, we’ll see them become productive members of society as best as they can.”

With files from Ross Neitz, Global News