City earmarks $12M this year to develop new approach to gun violence, mental health calls

After one of the most violent years in the city's recent history Toronto is ready to implement its 10-year "community safety and well being" plan — and it's prepared to spend $12 million during the first year, pending city council's approval.

Two reports going before Mayor John Tory's executive committee next week outline the 2022 work plan for the SafeTO strategy, which focuses on creating an alternative model for crisis response, and shifting the focus from reacting to violent incidents to preventing them.

The plan includes launching four pilot projects where non-police crisis teams will respond to mental health calls; developing a gun violence reduction strategy; providing more support to victims of violence; and improving data sharing across city agencies.

Tory commended the reports at a news conference Wednesday.

"It's a lot better to prevent crime from happening than it is to react after that crime has already happened," Tory said. "That lies at the root of this report."

The reports highlight the city's ongoing effort to expand the definition of what constitutes community safety beyond crime and policing. They come after a year in which Toronto saw 85 homicides, many of which involved guns, and after public pressure to remove police from the front-line response for people in mental health distress.

The centrepieces of the SafeTO plan are the pilot projects where new "mobile crisis teams" will be dispatched to non-emergency calls, including calls for people in distress and wellness checks, in four communities with some of the highest rates of such calls.

In 2020, Toronto Police Service (TPS) officers attended 33,059 "person in crisis" calls, according to one of the city reports, the most ever in one year.

City council approved the pilots in February 2021. Work began in the wake of global protests against police brutality and anti-Black racism, and the 2020 deaths of Regis Korchinski-Paquet, Ejaz Choudry, D'Andre Campbell and others during interactions with police sparked calls for change across the Greater Toronto Area.

The projects, for which the city is earmarking $8.5 million, will be piloted in four areas of the city, and four agencies have been selected to lead them: TAIBU Community Health Centre in northeast Toronto, Gerstein Crisis Centre in the downtown east side, Canadian Mental Health Association Toronto in northwest Toronto, and 2-Spirited People of the 1st Nations in on the west side of downtown.

The former two are expected to be in place in March 2022 and the latter two by June 2022.

The city says it has finalized a call triaging process where certain 911 calls will be redirected to the 211 phone service, an existing line dedicated to connecting callers to community, social, non-clinical health and related government services.

"As the pilot's dispatch partner, 211 will be responsible for triaging and dispatching calls to the mobile teams, and as appropriate, connecting inbound callers to supportive services and programs for follow-up supports," the report says.

The response teams will be made up of community health nurses, crisis counsellors, harm reduction workers and peer support workers trained in de-escalation, first aid and overdose response.