Inside Vancouver
Dead Wrong
By Dee Hon published Nov 1, 2007
Why the police need more training in how to handle the mentally ill.
Paul Boyd wasn't a gangster, a car thief, or a killer-not the kind of guy police spend their careers putting away. A 39-year-old animation artist, Boyd was, in the words of his family, "intelligent, gentle, humorous, and compassionate." But one evening in August, on Granville near 15th, Boyd swung at police officers with a lock on the end of a chain, knocking one unconscious and hurting another. Fellow officers shot him dead. Witnesses counted eight shots or more.
Details of the case will take years to emerge. There will be a coroner's inquest and an internal investigation by the VPD. But Boyd's mental illness-he had bipolar disorder-almost certainly played a role in his final moments. Police shootings are rare in B.C., but when they occur there's roughly a 50 percent chance the victim suffers from an acute mental illness. Unless we change the way we deal with such diseases, there will be more tragedies like Boyd's.
Police are increasingly forced into a role they're not suited for-to be caregivers instead of law enforcers. They're handling an ever-growing number of mental health crises. VPD spokesperson Howard Chow says that last year the VPD dealt with 200 mental health-related incidents per month. This year, it's more than 300. And these are just the reported incidents, he points out. The Canadian Mental Health Association estimates that police are the first point of access to mental health services for 30 percent of people with serious mental illnesses.
It's a situation that cries out for deeper reforms than just adjusting how police respond. Deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill over recent decades has put more people back into communities, but there hasn't been a sufficient increase in community mental health services, according to Camia Weaver of the CMHA's B.C. division. She runs the association's Mental Health and Police Project. She says crisis lines, emergency rooms, and mental health teams are sometimes poorly integrated. Hospitals often lack the resources to deal with any but the most acute cases. Yet there's little community-based care. "You need these services if you want people to live in the community successfully," says Weaver. "Otherwise, police end up being the first responders."
We need safe havens, she says, that people can turn to before they require hospitalization. "Many people can tell when they're reaching crisis," she says. "But the difficulty in getting into the hospital, and sometimes the difficulty of the hospital environment, make it an unappealing resolution."
Adding to the volume of cases police contend with is the rise in homelessness. The GVRD's 2005 count found that homelessness in the region doubled between 2002 and 2005. When mentally ill people are homeless, they lose access to the support, medications, and treatments that help them manage their disorders.
