Victoria council has narrowly approved hiring new police officers for the region's mental health teams.
Councilor Charlayne Thornton-Joe says the vote was 5-4 in favour. It came after a debate that lasted until 2am.
The two new officers will work with the region's Assertive Community Treatment Teams, which feature nurses, mental health experts, social works and police dealing with mental health cases in the community.
There are four ACT teams, but currently only one police officer.
"Vic-PD asked for us to do a pilot program where we would bring two more officers to assist so that when that officer is on holidays, or sick, or in court, there would be other officers to attend and help with the ACT teams."
The cost of the new hires is $240-thousand dollars over the course of the two year pilot project.
"This is a role of support and recognizing that we need to work together. It's the only way that we're going to help the people that need the most help in our society," says Acting Police Chief Del Manak. "We've actually gone to people that we're assisting and asked them 'what did you think? How did you feel about police officers being engaged?' And the general consensus is 'police saved my life.'"
Mayor Lisa Helps and enough other councilors agreed and narrowly approved the request. But others had reservations. Some disagreed with spending municipal tax dollars on dealing with mental health, which they say should be a provincial health authority problem. Others disagreed with police being on the front lines of mental health.
That final point is echoed by some outreach workers, like Bruce Dean, who argue police have no psychological or mental health training and are not suited to outreach work. He spoke at Thursday night's council meeting just before the vote saying "please don't pass this. This is just ludicrous. If they're doing anything for mental health the last place that money should be going is to the police. They terrorize. They're known on the street as the largest gang around."
In a previous debate, Mayor Helps acknowledged such arguments but felt the city needed to act. "In a perfect world, yes, the province and every province across the country would step up and fund these officers... but they're not doing that.” Helps pointed out police are often on the front lines of mental health anyways, since they're the first responders when there's a crisis involving mental illness, “in the middle of the night nobody is going to call a social worker. They're going to call the police."