ABSTRACT
Like their counterparts in many other countries, Canada’s twenty-firstcentury police service employs a contemporary policing model that reflects a systems and community-based approach to service delivery. Thus, police services have emerged to be an integral part of the extended mental health system, devoting significant resources to interactions with people with mental illnesses (PMI).* Most Canadian police services have developed some form of specialised service for PMI, including dedicated staff for this purpose, inservice education and training for police personnel including police officers, and interagency agreements with their mental health system counterparts. While the nature and quality of services provided by Canadian police services to PMI has improved significantly in the last decade, and generally PMI are more positive than negative about their interactions with police services,
What Is the Nature of Interactions Between Police and PMI? 20 The Social Context 23 How Do Police and People With Mental Illnesses View Each Other? 25
What Kinds of Formal Mechanisms and Programmes Exist Within Policing to Support Their Work With People With Mental Illnesses? 26 Guidelines for Police Working With the Mental Health System 28 Education and Training 29
Police Response Models 30 Where Are Things Headed-and Where Do They Need to Head? 33 References 35
the relationship remains, at times, ambiguous and ambivalent. To quote one participant in a study of the experiences of people who have a mental illness and who have also had contact with police:
A similar ambivalence has been evident among police services and police officers. For many years, there was a sense by police that they should not be playing a primary role in the management of people in the community with mental illnesses. For example, as recently as the late 1990s, a police chief in Ontario picketed a conference on mental illness, carrying a sign that read, “We are not mental health workers.” However, there is no doubt that there have been significant developments in the area of police-mental health liaison in the past decade. In this chapter, we will examine the trends as well as the relationship between police and PMI in the Canadian context, with particular attention to the questions:
• What is the nature of interactions between police and PMI? • What is the social context within which interactions between police
and PMI occur in Canada? • How do police and PMI view each other? • What kinds of formal mechanisms and programmes exist within
policing to support their work with PMI? • Where are things headed-and where do they need to head?
