The Victoria Police Department is asking municipal councillors to approve a two-year, $500,000 pilot project to create a better mental-health team, a new item in the 2016 budget.
At special joint meeting of Victoria and Esquimalt councillors Wednesday, police Chief Frank Elsner said people with mental-health issues trigger many calls for police assistance. A new way of responding is needed, he argued.
“Police are not the best people to deal with people in mental-health crises,” Elsner told councillors. “But we still get the calls.”
“Police are the first ones there and the last ones standing,” he said at the meeting held in Esquimalt to present the department’s provisional budget.
Overall, the department is asking for councillors to approve a 2016 budget of $50,629,102 — a 3.57 per cent increase over the previous budget of $48,884,183.
Of the requested increase, $1,392,918, or 2.85 per cent, is due to expected inflationary items such as $1,061,000 in salary hikes and $120,000 in DNA testing costs downloaded from the RCMP.
But the mental-health unit, along with a $79,000 audit operation to develop ways to measure success of police programs and $23,000 to assist the continuation of a proven restorative-justice program, for a combined total of $352,000, are all new items.
Elsner said the police department currently has one over-worked officer who collaborates with Island Health and provincial social workers on mental-health issues. It seems to be working out and calls from the public for assistance seem to have diminished slightly, he said.
But Elsner would like to see two more officers working to create a “wrap-around” response. So, instead of police simply taking a person in the middle of a psychotic episode to the hospital to be stabilized and then released back to the street, officers might assist with follow-up questions and assistance.
Also, adding the two officers would not necessarily result in a bigger department. They would become permanent only if councillors agree after two years that the program was a success.
Elsner said he couldn’t specify precise program details, but that a pilot project would offer chances to experiment.
“When we talk about a pilot project, we can say: ‘Let’s build this from the ground up,’ ” he said. “We can ask ourselves: ‘How can we address this issue?’ ”
Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps said that after listening to the presentation, she understands the police are in a tough spot. She echoed Elsner’s comments that police can’t do it by themselves.
Helps said the department has to take its place alongside agencies like Island Health and provincial social workers.
“It’s very much a partnership,” she said.
Esquimalt Mayor Barb Desjardins said she supports the pilot-project idea and is happy to see the department’s interest in an audit operation that would develop ways to measure the success of its programs.
“The idea of having it as a pilot project is that it will either prove itself or it won’t,” Desjardins said. “If it doesn’t work, we aren’t stuck with it.”
The proposed police budget now will be presented to Victoria and Esquimalt councils in separate meetings for final approval.
