Last week’s Mental Health Strategy report by the Vancouver Police Department came to a most remarkable conclusion: the best move cops can make when dealing with a mentally ill person who is acting out may be to not get involved at all.
That may have led to a different outcome for Phuong Na Du.
On Nov. 22, 2014, Vancouver police fatally shot Du at the corner of Knight Street and East 41st Avenue.
News reports at the time noted that when they first encountered him he was waving a piece of two-by-four around.
After he failed to comply with police directions, rounds of bean bag shots were fired at Du but failed to subdue him. That led police to take out their guns and shoot. He would die a few hours later at Vancouver General Hospital.
Du’s family later confirmed that he was receiving treatment for schizophrenia and was being well supported by them. He was also well known to the police, having been apprehended multiple times under the Mental Health Act.
At the time of his death, lawyer Doug King with the Pivot Legal Society said of Du, “there never had been issues with violence. He never had any kind of criminal record.” The only thing different this time was that he was holding a two-by-four, which may have been perceived as a weapon.
He was, regrettably, not the first mentally ill person to be killed by police in this country, nor would he be the last.
Interactions between Vancouver police and people with mental health problems recently were recorded at eight per day. And they have escalated over time, according to the author of the most recent report, VPD Superintendent Daryl Wiebe. He says that’s because of the increasing incidence of people who are “dual diagnosed,” which is to say they are both mentally ill and drug addicted.
A report from the Mental Health Commission of Canada was published a few months before Du was killed. The author of that report, public safety consultant and former police officer Terry Coleman, said that when it comes to interacting with individuals suffering with mental illness, training of first responders, including police in British Columbia, is apparently one of the most advanced and promising in the country.
(B.C.’s strategy around mandatory crisis intervention and de-escalation training was developed in response to recommendations from the Braidwood Inquiry into the 2007 death of Robert Dziekanski.)
But Coleman also said that some police still believe use of force is “inevitable” when dealing with mentally ill people. Those cops think that talking to people in a severely agitated state is often pointless.
That is a view that is discouraged at the VPD.
The department’s strategy can be traced over the past four decades and the introduction of “Car 87” in 1978, where a mental health worker accompanies a police officer to engage mentally ill people in distress.
And the force has complained for years about the inappropriate burden they have come under as first responders in situations dealing with severely agitated mentally ill individuals.
But there have been a number of reports recently from the VPD on the subject of dealing with that problem. Wiebe says at the same time the force has worked to de-stigmatize the issues of mental illness, recognizing that given the nature of their own stressful jobs, first responders are prone suffer from this condition as well.
Their approach around de-escalating situations has evolved as well, recognizing they are dealing with health issues and not simply criminal acts.
It has never been stated more clearly than in Wiebe’s most recent report where he discusses effective de-escalation techniques and observes that these incidents can “occur suddenly and can be exceptionally dynamic” and then concludes that for police it “may be acceptable not to engage with individuals at all.”
The very presence of a police officer can cause a situation to escalate.
Rather than arrest and incarceration, Wiebe’s report argues for more resources to deal with providing care.
That conclusion, and the broad consultative process Wiebe engaged in, has brought praise from many workers in the mental health field as progressive and thoughtful. That includes a not infrequent critic of the VPD, Pivot’s Doug King who says, “I am reasonably pleased and I’m tough to please.”
@allengarr
