Mental health: who gets help?

Jean René Junior Olivier was 37 years old. He died on August 1 after being shot three times in the chest by the Repentigny Police Department. His mother, who was worried about him, called emergency services. The case raises questions, concerns and anger for those close to Mr. Olivier, as well as for the community of Repentigny. For many, this is a tragedy that is not an isolated case and could have been avoided, since the deaths of Matthew Sheffields, Pierre Coriolan, Alain Magloire and Nicholas Gibbs, black men suffering from mental health problems, shot dead by the Montreal Police Service (SPVM), could have presaged it.

Why do such tragic events happen? Crisis intervention, profiling, discrimination, stigmatization: Mr. Olivier's family and experts testify to these systemic problems for which solutions exist.

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Call for help

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“I called 911 to come and help me with my son,” explains Jean Réné Junior Olivier's mother, Marie-Mireille Bence, to the media outside her home in Repentigny, the day after the tragedy. She wanted an ambulance to take Junior, as everyone called him, to the hospital. “I saw that my son had a problem. I immediately told myself that with the way he acts, it might be a psychosis,” says Ms. Bence. She said she told the dispatcher that she wanted Mr. Oliver to receive immediate help. “I told them, “Please take him to a mental hospital.” I made that clear,” she underlines.

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At the time of the intervention, the father of the family had a kitchen knife in his possession. “She went to the emergency services to prevent the worst, namely that her son did not commit suicide,” says Stanley Bazin, president of the Black League.

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Helen Dion, director of the Repentigny Police Department (SPVR), said in a statement that she did not wish to comment on the intervention, since the file is in the hands of the Bureau of Independent Investigations, responsible for shedding light on this case. The SPVR did not want to answer our questions either. The day after the tragedy, Ms. Bence spoke to the media outside her home in Repentigny. A few days later, she addressed the crowd gathered in front of Repentigny City Hall, where a hundred people took part in a vigil held in memory of the deceased. “Justice for Junior,” can we read on the T-shirts illustrated with three bullet holes put on by several for the occasion. “If I don't speak, I don't know how we're going to interpret the way my son was shot,” she exclaimed. the mother cried. “A policeman told me: “We had no choice, your son was shot three times in the stomach.” How? ” testifies Ms. Bence at the microphone.

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Family members and the community are demanding answers. The victim's mother wishes to know what will happen to the police officer who shot, an act that she, like many others, qualifies as criminal. “I don't know his face, I don't know his name” declares the victim's 18-year-old son Kayshawn Olivier. “He never received the help he asked for.” According to Dolmine Laguerre, Mr. Olivier's cousin. “He seemed to be in psychosis. He had a knife, he wanted to hurt himself. The mother was in shock and did not know what to do. She called the police for help. Instead of getting help, he died,” she told La Converse. Ms. Laguerre does not believe that her cousin was threatening and presented a danger to others, or that he was in a position to attack the police at the time of the intervention. She would have liked us to invite the man to calm down. Instead, he was shot three times in the chest, which she and her family cannot explain. “The police know how to aim. We could have shot elsewhere. Aiming at the heart means you want to kill it. Even her uncle, who was present, asked to be shot in the foot,” she said.

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“What happened was unfair. There are two things that we notice: mental health and skin color,” Ms. Laguerre says right away. “I think that if it were a white person, it would never have happened. They would have taken him to see a psychiatrist. He was different because we saw him as an animal. He is a man no matter what problems he had,” she adds. She also says that her cousin feared the police because of profiling and racial discrimination in the police force: “He was afraid that he would be shot. He was not feeling well. He was sad. When you're black, you don't have the right to be sad.” “White people don't kill them. We protect them. My son, it is because he is black [that he was killed]” notes the victim's mother while holding back her tears. Like others who will be speaking that evening, she cites high-profile cases of violent crime in Quebec where mental health played a role. The defendants, white, are still alive.

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An inadequate response

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“So if the police can't give us help, why are they there? ” asks Mrs. Bence to the assembled crowd. All she wanted was medical attention for her son. “It's really hard to find information about the dispatch service. We don't really know how they work,” says El Jones, a poet and associate professor of political and cultural studies at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax. She believes that the way we talk about mental health is indicative of how emergency services are deployed in response to a psychological distress call. “They ask if the person is violent, or if we are afraid of them,” explains the poet and professor. These types of questions can lead to police deployment, instead of more appropriate resources. “It's hard to have these conversations with police departments, who refuse to release information. We don't even know to what extent they are sent,” she said.

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Deescalating the crisis

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De-escalating or de-escalating a crisis is, however, what psychosocial workers, medical staff, but also teachers, or parents regularly do. “When we talk about de-escalation, we imagine something very technical, but it's just about talking to people with dignity and respect, and showing them that you care about them,” says Jessica Quijano, front-line worker and spokesperson for the Police Defunding Coalition. Ms. Quijano often intervenes in times of crisis. “I have been doing this work for 18 years, my colleagues and I are constantly intervening in situations like this. And we're not hurting anyone.” As the counsellor explains, the aim is to reassure the person that they know that they are in a safe environment, and to make them understand that we are there to help them. This can be done by speaking softly to them, by orienting them in the room, by asking what is going on or how they are feeling, by telling them that they are there to help and that they are safe. “It's about making the person feel cared for and cared for. The police often shout, scream and act as if they were criminals,” says Ms. Quijano.

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“The most difficult thing was that I was called to tell me that people should go in and lock the door,” says Ms. Bence, the mother of Jean René Junior Olivier. A few minutes later, her son was hit by police bullets. Ms. Quijano deplores this approach, which alienates people who can help alleviate the situation. “Often the police try to isolate everyone, the people present or accompanying them,” laments the speaker, who sometimes has to insist on the authorities to be present. “The police act as if they were afraid of the person, which is the opposite of intervention.”

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Mental health: between stigma and criminalization

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El Jones believes that perceptions of people with mental health problems need to change on both sides. “We're feeding the idea that if you have a mental health crisis, you're inherently violent, out of control, which isn't actually true,” believes the professor. It would be wrong to think that because their mental health is at stake, a person is not in a position to express themselves. “Often people want to talk, to be listened to. They are asked what they need, why they are upset, and what can be done for them. You can then negotiate the situation,” she explains. “The police are trained to fire, to manage the threat and not to defuse.”

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This fear is also transposed into our relationships with others. We often mistakenly believe that people with mental health problems are violent, which requires the help of the police. “We immediately start with the idea that we can't interact with someone in crisis, go see them and ask them if they're OK, because they could attack us,” Ms. Jones said. This feeds our propensity to call the police, a reflex that develops as soon as a situation perceived as dangerous, worrying, or uncomfortable arises. To explain this, Ms. Jones quotes the author Robyn Maynard, and her book Policing Black Lives (Black people under surveillance in French version). “We use the word “security” when talking about safety. For example, security is what you see in an airport,” she explains. “In the imaginary, there is the idea that the only thing that keeps us safe is the police. This use of the police to resolve a situation is reinforced in our society by the media, television, culture, education.”

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“When you combine mental health stigma with anti-black racism, people are portrayed as monsters and killed by the police,” Ms. Jones said. The numbers are revealing, as we can see that Black and Indigenous people are overrepresented in deaths at the hands of law enforcement, just as police interventions are more likely To end in murder when mental health is at stake.

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What is the role of the police?

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Why do we rely on the police for issues related to well-being and health? “It's because we don't have mental health infrastructure. We use prisons, police, and punishment to essentially contain and discipline people with mental health conditions,” Ms. Jones believes.

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Social services have been in decline for several decades as a result of budget cuts and constant underfunding. To make up for the lack, some tasks that social services occupied are relegated to law enforcement. “So there is a direct link between the suppression of all these communal services and the fact that the police are called in to fill these gaps, when their role is to tackle crimes,” she explains. According to her, a complete restructuring of the mental health system is needed at the national level. The lack of support also contributes to the distress of vulnerable people, who are more at risk of ending up in crisis.

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Responsibility and accountability

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The death of Mr. Olivier revives painful memories for Yusuf Faqiri. His brother, Soleiman Faqiri died in 2017 at the hands of the police at the Lindsay prison in Ontario. He was 30. Incarcerated for 11 days without any charges being brought against him, it was while waiting for his transfer to a psychiatric institution, which had been granted 3 days earlier, that Soleiman Faqiri died. Two investigations were conducted without any charges being brought in this high-profile case. “It's very touching and worrying,” says Mr. Faqiri, who believes that the situation is spreading in Canada as well as in Quebec. “Does that mean that people who suffer from mental health problems don't count their lives? ” he asks, referring to racialized people across the country who were suffering from mental illness at the time of their death in custody or following an intervention. He knows their names by heart. For the man who became an activist following the death of his brother, responsibility is at the heart of the problem. “If you are not held responsible for your actions, you will commit these actions,” he believes.

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“If there is no responsibility, I am sure there will be another tragedy soon. Mr. Faqiri wants this responsibility to be demonstrated at the legal level, but also at the level of practices and procedures. “Why is the system so opaque? More often than not, when a person dies at the hands of the police, we don't know their name,” he notes. Efforts must be made to ensure that such situations do not happen again. To do this, he wants police to work with communities, not just on the surface. “They need to be equal partners. It's not just about consultations, it's about knowing what issues are affecting communities.”

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Four years after the death of Soleiman Faqiri, Mr. Faqiri notes that there is more interest in mental health, a request made all the more urgent by the pandemic. He notes with sadness that, on the other hand, more and more attention is being paid to this kind of tragedy: “It's about paying tribute to your life, respecting it, telling your story, that's what's important,” he says about Jean René Junior Olivier. “What I hope is that these discussions can go a long way.”

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‍To go further

• The SPVR did not indicate whether agents are trained to defuse a crisis. For its part, the Montreal Police Service (SPVM) indicates on its website that all its agents will be trained by 2022.
• Jessica Quijano, an advocate, believes that police officers can be trained, but that they should not have to intervene in psychosocial crisis situations. She is of the opinion that qualified and specialized first responders should be sent in the event of a mental state crisis. This is the case in Eugene, Oregon, where since 1989 the Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets (CAHOOTS), a mental health crisis intervention program, has been responding to 911 calls since 1989.
• The city of Toronto has just deployed a pilot project with the creation of a mobile unit inspired by CAHOOTS. In New York, a pilot project will also be deployed in a few neighborhoods, aimed at preventing psychiatric crises from escalating.
• The Social Emergency Division, a pilot project set up by the Laval Police Service (SPVL), will allow responders to have access to 911 calls and to present themselves to perform an intervention without waiting for the police. “I don't understand why Montreal doesn't do the same thing,” says Jessica Quijano, who wants no armed individual to intervene.
• On their website, the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) indicates that it answers about a hundred mental health calls per year. There is a patrol composed of volunteer police officers in response in crisis intervention (RIC) whose mission is to defuse crises. The SPVM indicates that these agents are present everywhere in Montreal, but does not offer information on how they are deployed. The Psychosocial Emergency Support Team (ÉSUP), a squad of 6 police officers and 4 social workers who travel as a mixed duo, can also appear at the request of a patroller, but not on request during a 911 call.