WATCH ABOVE: Behind the scenes at Toronto Police College
Rondi McFarlane was sitting under a bridge holding a knife when she was Tasered.
She doesn’t remember much else: Between the psychotropic drugs and nightmarish trauma enveloping her brain, the repeated commands to “Drop the knife!” were too much to bear.
“I remember it not feeling fun” she says. But it beat getting pepper-sprayed she says.
McFarlane reached out to Global News after reading our series on the way Tasers are used, and the police push for more of them.
READ THE SERIES:
‘Without the Taser he’d be alive today:’ How should we police Taser use?
Taser Files: What we found in 594 pages of Taser incident reports
Psychiatrists in blue: How do you train cops to be better social workers?
What happens to you when you’re Tasered?
Since that 2007 encounter under the bridge, McFarlane figures she’s had hundreds of run-ins with police officers. She spent the better part of a decade in a Kitchener, Ont. psychiatric ward as she tried repeatedly to kill herself, as her self-harm left her in need of stitches, staples, surgery.
“I’m a human pincushion.”
When people look askance at the network of scars etched in her skin, she tells them she was attacked by a shark.
“When things were really, really bad, it’d just be me calling the crisis line going, ‘Yeah, I’m going to jump off a bridge.'”
Things are better now: McFarlane, diagnosed with post-traumatic stress and borderline personality disorder, has learned to calm herself down and rein herself in when she’s “derailed.”
“I’ve learned how to handle those situations.”
She just graduated with distinctions and a diploma in social work. She starts a degree program in community criminal justice in the fall.
In the meantime, she got to know her local police force better than just about anyone else. She knows exactly how cops deal with people in crisis, because she’s been that person in crisis more times than she can count.
“Do I believe police need better training? Oh frick, yes,” she said.
“Each interaction I have still teaches me that the system doesn’t know. They don’t have the training. Nobody’s trauma informed.”
And McFarlane wants to be the one to teach them.
McFarlane got in touch with us after reading a Global News investigation on police push for more Tasers and the way they use the stun guns now.
She would be okay with more police officers getting Tasers. With a major caveat: They need more training, and better backup for their encounters with people in crisis.
Cities across Canada have crisis teams that work with cops to de-escalate interactions with people who have mental illness. But there are too few, working limited hours in limited situations, McFarlane said.
READ MORE: How police forces deal with people in crisis
“We need more. Even the police will be saying, ‘We need more this isn’t part of our training.'”
McFarlane hopes to change that. She quotes from a Mental Health Commission of Canada report from last year that called for training cops who better understand mental illness and alter their attitudes toward sick people.
“In teaching police, we’ve got to work in collaboration with them — to understand it from their point.”
Tell us your story: Have you had an encounter with police while in crisis or struggling with mental illness? We want to hear from you.
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