Const. Tristan Williams and nurse Chris Nagainis belong to the Co-Response Team, a brand new VicPD/Island Health unit tasked with handling police calls with a mental-health component.
Squatting on the sidewalk, a man in a white hoodie smokes meth from a glass pipe while grooving to the tunes pounding out of his music player.
They find the man they’re looking for in a shelter in another part of the city. The news of his brother’s death hits him hard, but he says he wants to stay strong for their mother, which is one of the factors Williams and Nagainis take into account when assessing his state. Frightened, frantic and shivering in the wintry cold, she doesn’t protest when blankets are wrapped around her, or when she is ushered into the SUV.
The idea is for the CRT units, each with an officer and a mental health clinician partnered in an unmarked vehicle, to respond to crises traditionally handled by uniformed police alone. The CRT members — two cops, two registered nurses — have desks next to those of the department’s three community-resource officers.
Of course, it can get more complicated than that once they leave the building. Some people argue police shouldn’t be the ones to respond to mental-health calls at all, but at ground level, the lines between public-safety matters and health matters aren’t always so clearly defined. The wait times have fallen in recent years , but they still leave uniformed officers idled long enough — maybe an hour or two, or longer if the subject needs to sober up before being assessed — that it’s a problem when the 911 calls are stacking up and there’s crime to be fought.
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