If you read my first blog post in this series, you’ve probably come to realize that when someone is experiencing a mental health crisis, police are generally the default responders. This intervention has become so common that it often goes unquestioned. But police did not take on this role because they are uniquely equipped to provide care.
So, how did police become the de facto mental health crisis responders?
To understand how we got here, we need to look at two overlapping histories: the underdevelopment of community mental healthcare after deinstitutionalization (which I describe below), and the framing of acute distress as violent.
In Canada, the shift toward deinstitutionalization began in the 1960s. Large psychiatric institutions, referred to as asylums, began to close and people who had previously been confined in these settings were moved to live in the community. In principle, this represented an important move away from institutionalization and toward community-based care, but in practice the supports needed to make this transition meaningful were never fully built.
Community care requires more than closing institutions; it requires broader health and social infrastructure, including housing, income security and accessible healthcare. Instead, deinstitutionalization unfolded alongside political and economic shifts that reduced public investment in health and social services, leaving community mental health systems fragmented and underfunded.
This is where police became increasingly integrated into mental health response. As the supports needed to prevent and respond to crisis remained inadequate, police were positioned to fill gaps in the broader social infrastructure.
At the same time, understandings of mental health crises have long been shaped by social narratives that link acute distress with violence. For example, behaviours that may accompany crisis, such as confusion, agitation or fear are often interpreted through a lens of risk and danger, where distress becomes conflated with violence. Although people experiencing acute distress rarely exhibit violence, crisis situations are often seen as risky or threatening and become framed as public safety threats. This matters because the way we understand a situation shapes the kind of response that seems appropriate; when acute distress is understood primarily through the language of threat, police involvement can come to seem necessary or inevitable.
I also want to emphasize that the conflation of crisis with threat does not land evenly. The way crisis is interpreted is shaped not only by mental health stigma, but equally by racism and colonialism. Black and Indigenous people are more likely than white people to have their distress during crisis be interpreted as threatening.
To circle back to the question we started with: how did police become mental health crisis responders? In many ways, they were positioned to fill a gap in care because they were available, publicly funded and already built into emergency response systems. Simultaneously, their role has been reinforced by treating mental health crises as public safety matters, making police involvement seem necessary, even when other forms of care would be more appropriate.
So where does this leave us? In next month’s blog post, I’ll turn to the growing efforts to challenge police as first responders to mental health crisis and to the alternative models that are beginning to reimagine crisis care beyond policing. Stay tuned…
Photo by Luke Jones on Unsplash
