At Wednesday's Bradford West Gwillimbury/Innisfil Police Services Board meeting, Const. Mike Kayser provided an update on COAST (Crisis Outreach and Support Team).
Kayser was joined by Simcoe County COAST team lead Shannon Bond and COAST crisis worker Brittani Bell.
COAST is a program that helps individuals experiencing crises in the community due to mental health and/or addiction issues. A plainclothes police officer and crisis intervention specialist are partnered in an unmarked police car providing intervention, support, and assistance to 911 calls in the community to individuals 16 years and older.
“Part of what we do is we provide a risk assessment,” said Bell. “Once the risk is determined and identified, we move forward with risk intervention and supporting the individual. Part of that is providing community resources and how to access those, we provide coping strategies and immediate support to deescalate the situation. CMHA (Canadian Mental Health Association) has a lot of different programs within our agency where we can find them support as well.”
CMHA crisis workers have partnered with South Simcoe police, Barrie police, and Orillia OPP to provide COAST teams to these communities.
“The main purpose is to divert from the hospital where safe, as well as reducing time police are spending at the scene and apprehending,” said Bond. “Hopefully we can minimize the interactions with police going forward because we want to direct those calls where appropriate, which is mental health and not always police.”
Since its conception in 2017, COAST has seen a large increase in calls every year, particularly from 2020 to 2021.
“When I started, if we had one call a month as a police officer, that was the norm,” said Kayser. “Now it’s a couple of calls a day. It’s risen substantially. There’s a large increase in public awareness of the program and we do attract a lot of referrals now, it’s not just responding and providing an immediate response. We conduct face-to-face follow-ups, and even during COVID when a lot of agencies weren’t doing face-to-face, we continued to do those."
There’s also been a noticeable increase in crisis calls for youth in the area with a higher percentage in South Simcoe than other communities COAST serves.
“The representation here for youth and teens is a lot higher than in Orillia,” said Bond. “Maybe 70/30 on average (between adults and youth). Especially with COVID, they’ve had no social interactions and no outlets. For kids, school is safe and they’ve been at home without a safe place to be. It’s definitely growing.”
Right now, COAST offers a Monday to Friday coverage with CMHA and York Support Services Network providing crisis workers for support. Recently the Innisfil Community Foundation approved a $20,000 grant for COAST.
“It’s a substantial amount of money for us,” said Kayser. “What it does is provide an extra eight-hour shift every week on weekends when we don’t have anybody."
South Simcoe Police Chief Andrew Fletcher did indicate to the board that there are grants available to help support programs like COAST. The Service did apply in 2021 and were unsuccessful. Currently, they’re in the process of finding out why they were unsuccessful as they hope to apply again in 2022.
“Mental health is 24/7,” said board chair Chris Gariepy. “You can’t just pick Monday to Friday, and it’s shocking to me that the coverage isn’t there and the funding isn’t following it immediately to be a 24/7 solution. Mental health issues are getting more significant than ever. You see it in the force, outside the force, and I think we all experience it. We all experience someone you love or someone you know struggling through mental health. It’s disturbing to me that we don’t have the funding 24/7.”
South Simcoe police officers have been trained in crisis intervention to better handle calls when they come in and COAST is unavailable.
“I’m glad to hear that the training is going on,” said Gariepy. “But in my mind (the COAST workers) are better trained than any of our staff will ever be.”
“As police officers, it is not uncommon for us to go to these calls and listen to their problems and try to understand them, but essentially what (COAST workers) do is provide something different,” said Kayser. “It’s not just the education part of it, it’s the hope and a lot of these people don’t have that. They come there and provide extra hope to these people and we see positive things all the time because of it.”
More than anything, what COAST provides is support beyond the initial crisis call by providing resources and programming to help those in need in a long-term way rather than just in the moment.
“(COAST) does a fabulous job of connecting people to services,” said Fletcher. “We want to eliminate the time we’re doing crisis response, so the risk intervention and the proactive work with the follow-up after the fact.
"Most of us with full mental capacities and full educations struggle to navigate the health system on the best days, imagine going through all those struggles and trying to navigate that and not having the financial resources to do it or not having a house over your head. To me, that’s the tremendous benefit, the system navigation piece that happens after a crisis or even pre-crisis where we can get engaged early on," the chief added.
