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Halton Police, known for spearheading efforts in crisis intervention services, will receive provincial funding to increase its capacity to respond to a mental health or addiction crisis.
The grant comes when our community is reeling from the impact of the pandemic- made worse by decade-high inflation, the housing crisis and the war in Ukraine.
Halton Regional Police Service (HRPS) is one of the 28 police services across Ontario to receive the funding. With the provincial funding of $150,000 under the Mobile Crisis Response Teams Enhancement Grant, HRPS will add a Mobile Crisis Response Team (MCRT) to its existing teams.
Despite the COVID-19 disruptions, HRPS continues to offer and explore opportunities to train its officers in addressing mental health crises. It has Crisis Outreach and Support Team (COAST) and MCRRT for immediate outreach and support in the community.
Also, its Crisis Intervention Training (CIT) is "an innovative first-responder model of crisis intervention and de-escalation training for officers to respond with increased empathy and knowledge to persons with mental health concerns and/or addictions."
HRPS is also the first Police Service in Ontario to commit to providing the 40-hour CIT course to all frontline members. The CIT course was offered during the pandemic through a couple of virtual sessions and is now run in-person with reduced class sizes.
Going a step further, virtual reality (VR) empathy-based training was introduced in January 2020 as an extension of the CIT training. It was designed to provide officers with first-hand experience of the situations learned about during CIT in a "virtual" environment. The Training Bureau supervisor overseeing the VR training understands the community and officers the HRPS support.
The game-changing VR training provides an alternative mode of learning for officers. HRPS offered about eight sessions of empathy-based training as part of its annual training before halting due to pandemic restrictions in Feb. 2020.
The HRPS is currently looking at options to upgrade its VR empathy-based training for effective delivery.
Richard Judson of the Regional Community Mobilization Bureau observed that the pandemic brought several challenges for our community, including isolation and reduced in-person services by the service providers. He remarked, "Regardless of the type of situation our officers are called upon to assist with, empathy-based training will always be beneficial."