Mental Health Crisis Response: Beyond the Police Call
When someone experiences a mental health crisis in a public space, the default response in most cities is still a police call. Yet research consistently shows that the majority of mental health calls do not involve violence and can be resolved more effectively — and at lower cost — through co-responder models that pair mental health workers with officers, or through dedicated civilian crisis teams.
Why Default Police Response Has Limits
Police officers are trained to assess and manage risk, maintain order, and respond to criminal behaviour. They are not, in most cases, trained as mental health clinicians, and the tools and authority they carry are designed for situations involving actual or potential danger. When those tools and that authority are applied to a person experiencing a psychiatric crisis who poses no genuine public safety risk, the encounter can escalate rather than de-escalate the situation.
The costs are significant and multi-directional. Police services spend substantial resources responding to calls that do not require law enforcement skills. People in crisis may end up in emergency rooms or police cells rather than mental health services. And in the worst cases, encounters between police and people in crisis can end in harm to one or both parties.
None of this reflects poorly on individual officers, most of whom manage these situations as well as their training and tools allow. It reflects a system design problem: routing calls that require mental health expertise through a channel that primarily offers law enforcement expertise.
Co-Responder Models in Canadian Cities
Co-responder models address this by pairing a mental health worker directly with a police officer on calls where mental health is identified as a factor. The mental health worker provides clinical assessment and de-escalation, while the officer provides safety coverage if needed. Evaluations of co-responder programs in Canadian cities have generally found reductions in time spent on calls, higher rates of connection to mental health services, and, in some programs, reductions in apprehensions under mental health legislation.
The Saskatoon Health Region's partnership with the Saskatoon Police Service — which paired mental health workers with officers and was cited in 2016 as saving lives and money — is an example of this approach on the Prairies. The program demonstrated that mental health partnerships within existing police structures can be cost-effective while improving outcomes for people in crisis.
The Mental Health Commission of Canada has documented various co-responder and mobile crisis models across the country, noting that the most effective programs involve genuine integration between health and law enforcement systems rather than parallel structures operating in isolation.
Saskatchewan's Approach
Saskatchewan's approach to mental health crisis response has evolved alongside the province's broader changes to mental health and addictions services. The Mobile Crisis Centre in Saskatoon provides telephone crisis support and mobile outreach, operating as a first point of contact for people experiencing mental health crises and coordinating with police and health services as needed.
These services exist within a system that still primarily routes emergency mental health calls through police dispatch. The challenge for communities like Saskatoon is how to create pathways that more consistently match the response to the actual nature of the call — deploying mental health expertise when that is what the situation requires, and police resources when genuine public safety concerns are present.
Building Civilian Capacity
Some cities have moved further toward dedicated civilian crisis response teams that respond independently to mental health calls without police accompaniment. These models work best where careful call triage can reliably distinguish calls that need clinical response only from those where safety risks are present, and where mental health workers have access to a broad network of services they can connect people to.
Building that capacity requires investment in training, staffing, and the service networks that response teams can reliably draw on. It also requires sustained collaboration between health authorities, police services, and community organizations — the kind of sustained coordination that community safety coalitions are well positioned to facilitate.