B.C. Liberal Leader Andrew Wilkinson pledged Wednesday to hire more police and mental health workers to tackle crime and street disorder linked to rising homelessness in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak.
A Liberal government, if elected, will hire 200 police officers to fill vacancies across the province and add 100 psychiatric social workers and nurses to work with police on integrated crisis response teams, Wilkinson said.
“ This will free up other police resources to deal with the violent crime that we’re seeing,” he said. “And let’s not be deluded about this — the main victims of violent crime in our society now are the mentally ill people who are homeless.”
The NDP government already moved to increase integrated teams just prior to the election call by adding six Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) squads made up of psychiatrists, psychiatric nurses, social workers, nurses, police, addiction-recovery workers, mental-health workers and probation officers.
Three of the ACT units will be deployed in the Cowichan Valley, Nanaimo and Victoria, which already has four teams handling about 340 clients.
Not everyone agrees, however, that adding more police officers is the best solution for dealing with mental health and addictions issues on city streets.
Victoria and other cities across Canada and the United States began exploring alternative approaches following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May. Floyd, a Black man, died after a white police officer knelt on his neck and back for nearly nine minutes, touching off international demonstrations that included calls to defund police and shift resources to social-service agencies.
Victoria city council subsequently directed staff to explore the effectiveness of civilian teams such as those in Eugene and Springfield, Oregon that handled 24,000 public safety calls last year, the vast majority of which did not require police backup.
The mayors of B.C.’s 13 largest cities took a similar stance in a call to action last week that urged political parties to consider “alternative approaches” to mental health and addictions calls as part of a Police Act review.
Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps, who co-chairs the B.C. Urban Mayors’ Caucus, said police have an important role to play and that the ACT teams have worked well, but that hiring more officers isn’t the best way to deal with mental health issues.
“Psychiatric nurses are great, for sure,” she said. “Those are health care professionals. But police are a really expensive option.
“I don’t know that that would be the best way to spend taxpayer dollars [on] more police for mental health. I think we’ve kind of come to a consensus that that’s probably not the best approach.”
Wilkinson has accused the NDP of contributing to the disorder by “warehousing” people without homes in former motels and hotels without proper supports.
But Rob Fleming, the incumbent NDP candidate in Victoria-Swan Lake, said it’s “hard to take” that criticism when the B.C. Liberals fueled the homelessness problem by under-investing in affordable and supportive housing during their 15 years in office.
“We have been fixing their mistakes for three years and then COVID came along and we had to respond to outdoor encampments with emergency resources to get people safely indoors and physically distanced,” Fleming said. “We made major and rapid investments to do that. We have more work to do.”
Green Party Leader Sonia Furstenau said that rather than relying on police, the focus needs to be on providing housing and hiring mental health care professionals.
“We do need to ensure that the people that are coming out into our communities and helping people deal with mental health issues have the training and the understanding to do that well,” she said. “It should not be the responsibility of police to do that.”
lkines@timescolonist.com
