By Graeme Bacque
Tragedy struck yet again in Toronto on the afternoon of August 29th when 25-year old Pickering , Ontario resident Reyal Jensen Jardine-Douglas was gunned down by Toronto Police as he attempted to flee from a TTC bus.
Initially it was reported that police had been summoned in response to an ‘altercation’ on a bus, and that Jardine-Douglas had been fatally shot following a ‘confrontation’ with police.
Later on, it was revealed that no such altercation took place. Apparently Jardine-Douglas’s parents, whom had made repeated attempts to have their son involuntarily committed during the previous several days, were the ones to call the cops when he attempted to evade their efforts by hopping on the bus.
It appears that he panicked and attempted to flee when the cops stopped and boarded the bus – and the rest is now tragic history.
The police are claiming a knife was recovered from the scene of the shooting, but never clearly connected it to the victim.
This is the third fatal shooting involving the Toronto Police Service in the past eight months. In all three cases the cops have attempted to justify their trigger-happy responses by playing the ‘mental illness’ card.
This practice of involving law enforcement in emotional crises where no crime has been committed has to stop. Lives are being put on the line every time the Thought Police are summoned in response to someone’s visible distress.
The 'solution' being flouted in my jurisdiction and elsewhere is 'community crisis teams' which pair a cop with a psych. nurse on patrol.
This started as a pilot project in my precinct about ten years ago and after quietly receiving permanent funding there are now a dozen of these teams deployed in the City of Toronto .
There are even some psych. survivors I know who feel this half-assed 'remedy' is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I really have to question the thinking here.
However you try to pretty things up, at the end of the day it still amounts to a confrontation with a uniformed, armed police officer, and even where the victim physically survives the encounter the typical end result is still them being dragged off in shackles.
As well, this approach gives disturbing new powers to psychiatric personnel. Acting on their own, a psychiatric nurse (or other professional) has no more right to cross another person's threshold uninvited than does any other citizen.
By virtue of being paired with a police officer, all they have to do now is to express the belief that a 'medical emergency' exists within the home in question - which then gives the cop legal authority to force entry, and voila! Instant psychiatric home invasion, all nice and legal.
The victims in these cases will never be criminally charged, speak to a lawyer or get to have the circumstances of their detention reviewed by a judge or JP - but they still lose their freedom, and for most who enter he system this way, that's only the start of the fun. (Note the bitter irony).
I had my own run-in with this particular Mental Health Gestapo unit in April of 2009 when a misinterpreted Facebook status update resulted in my apartment being overrun with cops.
Two fortuitous circumstances saved my ass that spring evening. I had stepped out and wasn’t home when the cops arrived (eight or nine of them, according to the account a neighbor gave me later that night), along with the fact that several of my friends also responded and covered my back until I was able to disengage with the police.
I was lucky – a brief meeting with one cop in a public place (on the street corner outside my apartment building, in daylight) with my friends bearing witness was sufficient to bring the situation to a peaceful conclusion.
Far too many others are much less fortunate. Had my skin been a different color, or I hadn’t had the backing of my friends...
You'd think by now that people would realize this approach is akin to playing with old dynamite and literally puts lives at stake every time it happens.
But most folks are still too conned by the official 'mental health professional' mantra of aggressive intervention being the only way to go, or too freaked-out at the sight of someone else's emotional distress to stop and consider other possible options.
What we need is neighborhood-based, non-medical, hassle-free crisis centres, staffed by psychiatric survivors, where distressed people can go at any hour of the day or night to receive sympathetic counseling, or have a meal or to get a few hours’ uninterrupted sleep in a safe environment.
We need ‘community crisis teams’ of our own, not involving either the police or psych. professionals, that are trained to intervene nonviolently and de-escalate crises by offering reassurance to the frightened, lonely, confused souls who could otherwise become the victims of an inappropriate police response.
We also need on-call telephone peer-based trauma counseling available at any time of the day or night for people who simply want to talk.
This latter resource was provided to protesters by trained volunteers during the recent G-20 summit in Toronto – these anti-globalization kids are really on the ball with this kind of stuff! We can learn a lot from the example being set by these young people – we’ve got some potentially valuable allies there.
And while the idea may make some people uncomfortable, spiritual support tailored to the individual’s personal belief system would be a useful resource if someone wants it. My own feeling is that a large percentage of the issues being pathologized by psychiatry (and responded to violently by law enforcement and ‘mental health professionals’) are in fact spiritual in nature.
Most of the remainder can be attributed to trauma, in which case responding with force is the worst mistake that can be made. It makes no sense to intervene aggressively with an individual who is already frightened or in emotional pain. This is just begging for a situation like what resulted in last Sunday’s tragedy. At the very least it will only exacerbate the person’s distress.
Until people lose their irrational fear of others’ emotional distress; until people realize that calling in the cops to deal with such crises is a recipe for disaster, and until people realize that relying on psychiatry’s promised ‘quick fix’ approach to dealing with distressed (or merely bothersome) human beings is not the way to go, then tragedies such as befell Mr. Jardine-Douglas will only be repeated.
Graeme Bacque
August 31, 2010
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