The Toronto Police Service will outfit some officers with a new non-lethal weapon that fires a projectile known as a “sock round” and will provide more front-line cops with Tasers as part of its response to two exhaustive reports into how police deal with people in crisis.
According to a report that will be presented to the Toronto Police Services board on Thursday, the TPS has already implemented or began work to implement 133 of the 140 combined recommendations contained in a coroner’s inquest into the fatal police shootings of three mentally ill people (Sylvia Klibingaitis, Michael Eligon and Reyal Jardine-Douglas) and a separate report by former Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci that was commissioned in the wake of the fatal police shooting of 18-year-old Sammy Yatim on board a streetcar two years ago.
Some of the steps police are taking to implement the recommendations include adding three weeks to new recruit training to “reinforce de-escalation and de-stigmatization” when dealing with people in crisis, adding an additional day to the annual in-service training given to officers to tackle the same topics and beginning a pilot project in 14 and 22 divisions where “early-career officers” are required to visit with a psychologist for a mental wellness checkup.
The report also outlines a number of changes police have made to their procedures for when officers are dealing with people in crisis, including the formalization of a practice of having officers with additional mental health training take the lead on such calls and a new policy wherein a single officer is designated as a “primary contact” with the mentally ill person.
The report also says that police have expanded their use of mobile crisis intervention teams, wherein trained mental health nurses work in concert with police officers, so they are available in all 17 divisions between the hours of 6 a.m. and 11 p.m. Previously, police could only call in one of the teams between 11 a.m. and 9 p.m. and only in certain parts of the city.
The release of the action plan comes as Toronto police officer James Forcillo's second-degree murder trial in the shooting of Yatim gets underway in a University Avenue courtroom.
“We have implemented as many of the recommendations as we can, given the limits of knowledge, science and resources in the continual pursuit of excellence for safe encounters, which means zero injury, zero death,” Deputy Chief Mike Federico said in a release posted to the TPS website.
Shields, new non-lethal weapons also under consideration
According to Federico, the TPS established a project team and 11 working groups to study the recommendations with “a view to implementing as many as possible.”
The result is an extensive list of actions being taken by the TPS, though some of them were already in the works prior to the release of the coroner’s inquest findings and the Iacobucci report.
On use of force, the report states that Police Chief Mark Saunders will present a report to the board sometime in 2016 on how he plans to expand the deployment of Tasers to an additional 184 front-line officers. The report also says that the TPS is “studying the feasibility” of equipping Primary Response Officers with shields that might allow them “to move closer to a threat to secure it without increasing the likelihood of using lethal force.”
Meanwhile, the report also reveals that police plan to introduce a new non-lethal weapon known as a “sock round” though no details are provided about the number of officers that would be outfitted with the device or the timeline for doing so.
“This will augment the other less-lethal weapon options. This weapon will help officers create or maintain distance which helps create time to de-escalate the situation,” Federico said. “Emotionally disturbed people are no more likely to be violent than somebody else, but when they are violent, we need to get them under control, using as little force as possible and avoid, to the extent we can, the application of lethal force.”
Of the seven recommendations that the TPS has not implemented, three have financial impacts and are being studied further while the other four propose looking into effects that conducted energy weapons have on people who are emotionally disturbed.
In the case of those recommendations, Federico said the TPS is satisfied with current research suggesting there is no additional risk to vulnerable persons posed by the devices.
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