N.S. shooting report calls for police to be 'secondary' in public safety work

The report into Nova Scotia's mass shooting echoes and validates what advocates, researchers and racialized people have said for years — police are often "not best trained or equipped" to deal with people in crisis.

The final report from the Mass Casualty Commission on the 2020 mass shooting examined the events of April 18 and 19 when 22 people were killed. It also explored red flags, policing issues and root causes of violence that led to the rampage.

Among dozens of recommendations, the commissioners found that police officers should be important partners in protecting public safety — but not at the centre. 

"This conclusion is interrelated with our earlier recommendations about the need for public health approaches to violence prevention and the consequent need to decentre the criminal justice system as our primary response," states the report.

"Police services will continue to have a vital role within this rebalanced public safety system but, in some ways, it will be a secondary one."

In Nova Scotia specifically, the report recommends that the province establish a mental-health care model for urban and rural residents that includes crisis care, and eliminates the practice of "using police as the sole first responders to mental health calls."

It's a very similar message as that in last year's report on defunding the police in Halifax, put together by a subcommittee of the Halifax Board of Police Commissioners.

"We have been dying. We have not had calls answered in our communities. We have had domestic violence not be addressed … These are things that we've been screaming about for decades," said El Jones, committee chair, advocate and educator. 

"It's good, I guess, in that sense that a wider part of society's beginning to understand that. But at the same time, yes, you know, we also know that we have lost a lot of people across this country."

The report called on the federal government to subsidize the cost of such mental health services to at least the same proportion that it subsidizes the cost of policing in Nova Scotia.

Jones said she's seen the conversation shift dramatically in Canada since the Black Lives Matter movement, and in the wake of wellness checks that turned fatal when police responded.

Even people who take issue with the term "defunding" police agree that something different must be done with mental-health calls, Jones said.

Police forces themselves have said they support that change, as officers often spend hours in hospitals due to  legislation requiring them to stay with people in a mental-health emergency.

Halifax RCMP recently told the board of police commissioners such calls rose 70 per cent from 2014 and 2019 — and the trend persists. The Mounties reported 828 mental health calls in 2021, and 1,056 calls from January to November 2022.