Advocates for prisoner justice, mental health and addictions support are welcoming a B.C. police watchdog report that pans the “outdated practice” of placing intoxicated people in police custody through drunk tanks.
The Independent Investigations Office of BC decision published Monday calls for governments to ensure intoxicated people receive health care from trained professionals, rather than supervision from officers or jail guards in an environment that cannot guarantee their health and safety.
Its chief civilian director, Ronald MacDonald, notes that alternatives like sobering centres exist around the province.
Guy Felicella, a peer clinical adviser for the Vancouver Coastal Health, agreed with the recommendation.
“What we always seem to look upon in society is more on the punitive side, you know — take the person off the street and put them in an environment such as jail. Jail is not a health facility, it’s a place to incarcerate people,” he explained.
“Whether it’s sobering somebody up, it’s still the same concept. It’s going back to punishing somebody.”
MacDonald’s report arose from the case of a Williams Lake man who had a “life-threatening health crisis” in RCMP cells last year while thought to be suffering from alcohol or drug withdrawal.
He was arrested on Nov. 13, began vomiting about 24 hours later, was found struggling to breathe and rushed to hospital. The report says the RCMP’s call for help was actually “optimal” for the man because his symptoms were serious enough that he was hospitalized, but any later would have increased his risk of death.
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MacDonald says the officers didn’t commit any offences in the way they treated the man but he has concerns about how intoxicated prisoners are housed.
Felicella, who has overdosed six times in his life, said the Williams Lake man should have been seen by a nurse at a hospital or sobering centre from the get-go and continually re-assessed after that.
“Police just don’t have the capacity or the ability to actually notice the signs of somebody — sure, he’s intoxicated, but what else is going on? Those are the things that, sadly, went unaddressed.”
The advocate said he’d like to see more sobering centres across the province, but noted that folks in need of sobering up could also be brought to a health centre. It’s especially important, he added, in the midst of a toxic drug crisis that has killed more than 12,000 British Columbians since 2016.
“We have six people dying every day in the province,” said Felicella. “It (could have) presented as alcohol, but we don’t know … that’s why it’s so important to be assessed by a health-care practitioner.”
Questioned on the report Tuesday, Premier David Eby agreed with the premise.
“The concern that we have about people’s safety, especially with the toxic drug crisis that we’re in, where people may be both using alcohol as well as opioids or other drugs, is that they’re able to survive the night when they’re too intoxicated to take care of themselves,” he said.
“It’s one of the reasons we dedicated a significant amount of money to a new detox facility in Vancouver. It will be medically-supervised so that people are able to detox, they’re able to recover from intoxication in a safe environment.”
He said asking police to take care of drunk people is “not their best use.”
“We need police out there fighting crime. But certainly there are issues of people when they’re detoxing who become violent. So security is necessary but generally speaking, this is a medical issue, not a policing issue, which is why we’re taking this approach in Vancouver, and across the province we support that approach.”
Last November, the City of Halifax green-lit a three-year pilot project that would use a sobering centre as an alternative to police lockups. It would accommodate 10 people at a time and be staffed primarily by non-medical personnel, with some nursing support.
That initiative stemmed from the 2016 death of a man who was arrested for public intoxication outside a local hospital, placed in a jail cell wearing a spit hood, and died from suffocation after vomiting into the hood. When Halifax advanced its pilot program, his mother had said her son would be alive had he been sent to a sobering centre instead.
Jennifer Metcalfe, executive director of the West Coast Prison Justice Society’s Prisoners’ Legal Services, said drunk tanks can be “dehumanizing,” and police interactions with intoxicated people can have “really tragic consequences.”
“I think it’s really important that people who are intoxicated receive appropriate care and that care can’t be delivered in a jail cell,” she said in an interview.
“I think it’s really important that people receive a health-care response and that they be treated with compassion in those circumstances.”
–– with files from The Canadian Press
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