In a bid to improve police response to mental-health service calls, crisis workers with the Oxford chapter of the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) will be embedded with officers from the Woodstock Police Service and Oxford OPP on such calls starting this fall.
The partnership is part of a two-year province-funded pilot project that will see the formation of the Mental Health Engagement and Response Team or MHEART. The CMHA workers will be able to help officers de-escalate situations, and can help determine whether someone should be diverted to local mental-health supports or needs to be apprehended under the Mental Health Act, police said.
“We’re hoping that within those two years that we can show this is a huge, valuable asset and resource for both police services and the CMHA that we can continue well into the future,” said Oxford OPP Const. Stacey Culbert.
“As it sits right now, if we have a mental-health crisis that’s happening, police will have to wait on scene and wait for the mental-health workers that are on call to come out.”
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It’s not yet clear how many workers will be embedded with the officers, and how often. A starting date for the pilot project has also not been released. Culbert said those kinks would be worked out in the next couple months, adding workers won’t be with officers 24 hours a day.
Culbert said police hope the pilot will align with the force’s current mental-health strategy and help improve officer training and the mental-health services already offered by police.
“We’re hoping some of these chronic calls, where people really need to get extra services and get connected with those services, we’re hoping that these resources will now become more fluid,” Culbert said.
“We have individuals in our community that are going to need long-term mental-health intervention, and we don’t want them to certainly fall through any cracks in any of the systems that are in place right now, but just hoping that this partnership can continue to be built upon.”
In a statement, provincial police said the response team, funded by a grant from the Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services, will also result in the freeing up of officer time from fewer emergency-room visits.
Last year, provincial police reported officers attended nearly 16,000 mental health-related occurrences across the province — the third year in a row the number of occurrences rose. Police responded to 14,022 occurrences in 2016 and 13,291 in 2015.
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