The committee met at 2:01 p.m.

[D. Routley in the chair.]

Deliberations

D. Routley (Chair): Hello, everyone. I’d like to welcome you to our meeting of this Special Committee on Reforming the Police Act.

I’d like to ask the members for a motion to move in camera for deliberations.

From Garry Begg and seconded by Karin.

Motion approved.

The committee continued in camera from 2:02 p.m. to 2:31 p.m.

[D. Routley in the chair.]

D. Routley (Chair): We can bring our guest in.

Hello, Chief Skinner.

C. Skinner: Good afternoon. We’re doing well down here in Oregon.

D. Routley (Chair): Well, we can hear you, and you can hear us. That’s the first mark of success when it comes to Zoom. Thanks very much for joining us today.

I’d like to welcome everyone to this meeting. My name is Doug Routley, and I’m the MLA for Nanaimo–North Cowichan and the Chair of the Special Committee on Reforming the Police Act, which is an all-party committee of the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia.

I would like to acknowledge that I’m joining today’s meeting from the traditional territories of the Malahat First Nation.

I’d like to welcome all those who are listening and participating to the meeting.

Our committee is undertaking a broad review with respect to policing and related systemic issues within B.C. We are taking a phased approach to this work and have been meeting with a number of organizations and individuals over the fall and winter to follow up on input we’ve already received and to learn more about new models and approaches that have been drawn to our attention.

For today’s meeting, we will be having discussions about the CAHOOTS program with Chief Chris Skinner of the Eugene police department. After him, we will hear from Tim Black, director of counselling from the White Bird Clinic. Our presenters have 15 minutes to speak, each, followed by questions for both.

As a reminder to the presenters, the audio from the meetings is being broadcast live on our website. As well, a complete transcript will be posted there.

Now, thank you for joining us.

I’ll ask the members of the committee to introduce themselves. I’ll begin with my friend Karin Kirkpatrick.

K. Kirkpatrick: Hello, there. I’m Karin Kirkpatrick. I’m the MLA for West Vancouver–Capilano.

I am joining you from the beautiful territories of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

R. Singh: Rachna Singh, the MLA for Surrey–Green Timbers.

I’m joining you from the shared territories of Kwantlen, Kwikwetlem, Katzie, Semiahmoo and Tsawwassen First Nations.

H. Sandhu: I am Harwinder Sandhu, MLA for Vernon-Monashee.

I’m joining you from the unceded and traditional Syilx territory of the Okanagan Indian Nations.

Thank you so much, Chief, for joining us. I look forward to your presentation.

[2:35 p.m.]

G. Begg: Hello, Chief. I’m Garry Begg. I’m the MLA for Surrey-Guildford.

I’m coming to you today from the traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including the Kwantlen, the Katzie and the Semiahmoo First Nations.

R. Glumac: Hi. I’m Rick Glumac, MLA for Port Moody–Coquitlam.

I’m on the traditional territory of the Coast Salish peoples.

G. Lore: Hi, Chief. Grace Lore. I’m the MLA for Victoria–Beacon Hill.

I am on the territory of the Esquimalt and Songhees Nations, the Lək̓ʷəŋin̓əŋ-speaking people.

D. Routley (Chair): One of our members may be picking his daughter up at the school bus. That comes first. He’ll be joining us in a few minutes.

Dan Davies, the Deputy Chair, go ahead.

D. Davies (Deputy Chair): Good afternoon, Chief. I’m looking forward to the conversation. Dan Davies here, the MLA for Peace River North.

I’m phoning in today from the traditional territory of the Dene people, heading north on the Alaska Highway.

Welcome.

D. Routley (Chair): Thanks a lot to all of you.

Assisting our committee today is Karan Riarh, from the Parliamentary Committees Office, and Billy Young, from Hansard Services. We thank them both very much for their support. Thank you, all.

Now I’d like to introduce Chief Chris Skinner, from the Eugene police department.

We’ve been looking forward to this, Chief Skinner. I know that you’ve been helping hundreds of cities in the U.S. So it’s not like you don’t have your hands full outside the jurisdiction. We appreciate you making the time today.

Presentations on Police Act

EUGENE POLICE DEPARTMENT

C. Skinner: It’s my pleasure. You’re right. We’ve been having these conversations all over North America, quite frankly. They’ve all been great conversations that all mean something a little bit different for everyone, depending on where you’re at and what you’re hoping to accomplish. Tim and I have actually done this together a few times, so he’s a great resource with respect to the perspective from inside the White Bird Clinic, and specifically CAHOOTS.

Of course, I’ll speak from a public safety perspective and, really, a perspective from, in many of our areas, a system that happens to be the catch basin for everything else that society has not been able to solve. So we need to think about how we migrate away from that and stop using our public safety system to answer all of those questions. We’ll talk a little bit about that.

Fifteen minutes. I’m going to check my clock, because I want to make sure that I’m on time, because what I’ve found through these things is some of the most valuable time is for the questions that often come up, as opposed to listening to a chief talk.

I will say that it’s somewhat familiar to hear where you’re all from, because my 14-year-old is a competitive travel hockey player, and we are generally in Canada…. Except for these last couple of years in COVID, we’ve spent a lot of time in British Columbia, everywhere from all the way over in Kelowna, Kamloops and Penticton, all the way into B.C., and playing a lot of hockey up there. I’m not so ashamed to say that very rarely are we winning when we come to Canada. But that’s good for him to have those experiences.

Let me just talk a little bit about the CAHOOTS program and the perspective from the public safety side. Let me just frame this discussion a little bit. Eugene, Oregon, is straight down the I-5 corridor from Vancouver, just south of Portland about 95 miles. It’s right on that I-5 corridor. It’s a city of about 180,000 people. We have a large university here, the University of Oregon, so we have a fairly significant footprint nationally when it comes to the Oregon Ducks and how people see Eugene.

The other thing that we’re struggling with, which is very salient to this conversation, is…. We also have one of the highest point-in-time counts of unsheltered adults, really, on the west coast. When you think about a city of 180,000…. I think this last year we were at over 2,000 unsheltered adults. For a city that size, it’s pretty significant here, within the jurisdiction. Many of the calls for service that we receive — and many of the behavioural health crises do include a mental health crisis and substance-addicted people who are dual diagnosis — oftentimes come from our unhoused population. So there is a lot of response to that population.

[2:40 p.m.]

Our relationship with CAHOOTS is well over 30 years old. It really, really started out of just kind of a grassroots recognition of a gap in services around the need to be able to respond to some of the behavioural health issues that we’re having and having a police department that in some cases, either couldn’t respond because we were too busy or some recognition, maybe even over 30 years ago, of saying: “Should police respond to some of these?”

Here we are 30 years later — 30 years’ worth of evolution around the product that CAHOOTS is and how it fits into the system and, maybe even more importantly, the relationship that we’ve built with our CAHOOTS partners that we constantly are working on and trying to make better. It’s something that I think both CAHOOTS and the police department and the city of Eugene have invested heavily in because there have been some really, really rough times, and but for that relationship, it could have been really tough to stay in partnership together.

I can’t emphasize enough that whatever system is put in place, the relationship is really, really important — as are most of our businesses. In being successful in business, the relationships are really important.

The other thing that I would do is I would say that it’s not a one-size-fits-all type of system. It works for Eugene, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it works for other places. Every public safety agency in every jurisdiction responds to these types of calls a little bit differently. There are some agencies that send police to all of these calls. The minute somebody picks up the phone and calls either 911 or non-emergency 911, their default resource is to send police to triage and deal with those calls, whether they’re criminal or not. That has been their answer to this.

Here in Eugene, many of these calls that we get that CAHOOTS responds to are not calls that we would dispatch our officers to, largely because we’re a busy, busy jurisdiction to the extent that we have to triage those calls. There are about 160 calls for service a day that we can’t get to; we’re so busy. That’s across the spectrum. That would be police calls, calls that are kind of what we would call our low- or middle-tier calls — which would be like the cold burglaries, the car prowls, some of those society types of crimes that don’t have a suspect, and it’s not a crime in progress — that fall to a lower priority, and then, of course, the CAHOOTS calls.

When we think about the concept of CAHOOTS, many people talk to me and say: “How do I do something like CAHOOTS so that I take the stress off my police department?” The first thing I ask them is: “Okay, what’s your police department responding to?”

We have to think about doing the analytics about really understanding what it is you’re responding to and then asking that tough question, “What should we be responding to?” and maybe, more importantly: “What shouldn’t we be responding to? How do we match the right resource with the need? How do we build a different resource, besides law enforcement, to go to those needs that are in our community?”

That’s what CAHOOTS is. It’s an example of building a resource that not necessarily defers a bunch of calls for service for us but does definitely fill a gap — a gap in a service that we otherwise wouldn’t have. That’s how that’s built.

The contract resides with us. I often scratch my head and wonder why the police department holds the keys to the kingdom around a contract for calls for service that don’t necessarily require police response. But that’s how it’s kind of evolved and grown up.

We’ve built this relationship, and we hold the service level agreement, which is a very specific contract around service and what the expectation is. We hold that. It’s within my budget for CAHOOTS. We provide the vans. We provide the electronics in the vans. Maybe most importantly, we provide the dispatch centre that allows for intake of calls from the entire community and for us to triage those calls so we can determine whether there’s a safety component or not or if it absolutely fits right in, squarely, in the CAHOOTS wheelhouse. And then we dispatch those out.

CAHOOTS very much is an extension of the public safety answering point to the extent that they receive and will dispatch those calls, but we let CAHOOTS manage their call volume the best that they can.

I think what Tim would tell you is that even now with the demand, they’re not able to get to all of their calls for service or at least not get to them as timely as they would hope to. We’re talking about what it looks like and thinking about what it looks like to free up some financial resources to expand services above and beyond what we have.

[2:45 p.m.]

What we do have today is we have 36 hours of service in a 24-hour period. At one point, we have two vans on at the same time to help with the highest time of the day for call volume — and being able to do that. I will tell you that that’s not enough for a city of our size and the calls that we’re handling. Those CAHOOTS vans handle upwards of 15,000 calls for service a year, approaching almost 20,000 calls for service a year, that fill that important gap.

We’ve done some analysis around the types of calls that they go to and whether or not we should be sending a police officer to those or if we’ve chosen to use CAHOOTS instead of police. About 6 to 8 percent of our police calls were able to divert to CAHOOTS and not have to respond to. So there is a slight savings there, when you think about them picking up 6 to 8 percent of that call volume.

I don’t want to ever minimize the impact that they have, but in my mind, one of the things that really often doesn’t get talked about is: people that are in behavioural health crisis, if left unattended, could have the propensity to escalate to the point where it does become a dangerous situation and then necessitates police response. Now we’re headed down a path that we can’t unwind, that oftentimes could result in use-of-force incidents and injury and/or death. We absolutely don’t want that.

When I think about CAHOOTS and what they go to, I do think about the calls they take off our plate. But maybe more profoundly for me is they are almost a call prevention model for law enforcement. They can get there quickly. They can stabilize a situation by their very presence and their mere presence. They have a tendency to de-escalate people that are already suffering from some kind of a mental health or behavioural health crisis — unlike law enforcement, with the way we look, that does not have a tendency to de-escalate those folks.

These folks don’t immediately think about jail as an option. When CAHOOTS shows up, which is a real advantage, versus when law enforcement shows up, the fact of making a wrong decision at the wrong time could result in an arrest or a custody situation.

There are a variety of real advantages to having CAHOOTS and the way that they respond to be able to go to those, to stabilize and de-escalate those calls so that we prevent those from becoming a police call for service. Deferrals are one conversation. The other conversation is prevention and what they are preventing.

What I’ll do is I’ll kind of wrap up with a couple of minutes here just so that you guys can hear from Tim as well.

I’ll use this analogy. The public safety system — police, fire, EMS, CAHOOTS, any of those things — is like an emergency room. It’s a great spot for intake. It’s a great spot to be the first touch for something. But if you don’t build the hospital around it so that these folks that get stabilized out on the street don’t have off-ramps to wellness, then you’re responding to the same people over and over and over again.

People really think about wanting to heavily invest in CAHOOTS, that first response, which is fantastic…. But if we don’t spend time thinking about the other systems that we have to build around it, so that these folks go from that first response or that first intake of the emergency room and have the resource to be able to send them somewhere else where they can get on that path to wellness, then we’re just responding to those same people over and over again. We’re stabilizing them. We’re getting them to their appointment. Then guess what. We’re responding to them the next day and the next day and the next day.

I think Tim would tell you that there are a lot of frequent flyers to the extent that he knows a lot of names. Those folks working on those vans see the same names over and over again, just like we do in the criminal justice system when we arrest the same people over and over again.

There’s no system around us — or around us as an emergency room, so to speak — to be able to do that. That is, in my mind, an epic failure by this country and this state, of divesting in mental health services.

Just think about this being a component of that, but don’t lose sight of the long game, which is: we want to put ourselves out of business. We don’t want to have to respond to these. How we do that is making sure we’re also investing in the hospital that we need to be building in and around that initial triage and emergency room concept with police, fire and an alternative response, to CAHOOTS.

[2:50 p.m.]

As it pertains to police reform, I think one of the foundational pieces for us…. Here in Eugene we have a very, very robust civilian oversight system. I have an independent police auditor, I have a civilian review board, and I have a police commission that informs us on everything that we do. So it’s very robust for an organization our size.

In the state of Oregon, the Legislature has passed over 23 different bills informing police reform, mandating certain police reforms. I think it probably leads the country, out of state government, on the number of police reform bills that we’re adhering to now, and I testified on many of those.

When it comes to reform, for me, one of the things that rings very, very true is: how do we create alternative responses and match the right response with the need and being able to do that? We’re really working hard on what that looks like here to make sure that we get our police officers back doing what police officers should be doing, which is responding to, intervening in and investigating serious criminal behaviour and/or people that are becoming victims of serious criminal behaviour of life or property safety. That’s really what we should be doing — and finding different and more alternative ways to respond to some of society’s other problems that oftentimes have fallen to us to respond to.

There I’m going to stop and let you kind of go on with whatever the next part of your program is. Certainly, I’m hanging out here, happy to entertain any questions whenever that’s appropriate.

D. Routley (Chair): Thank you very much. I think we haven’t yet been able to reach Tim. Staff are trying to do that.

Maybe we can go straight to questions from members, if that’s okay. I’ll ask members to raise their hands.

R. Singh: Thank you so much, Chief. We have heard so much about CAHOOTS. So it’s really good to hear firsthand from you on that. You also talked about some practical realities with running a program like CAHOOTS and like looking at it from the holistic angle, which is really good.

One thing that I would be interested in, and you touched on it a little bit, is about the funding. A lot of times, whenever any police department or provincial government or anybody wants to start a new program, they look at that. How did CAHOOTS…? It’s almost 30 years. What is the funding process for it?

C. Skinner: Thank you for that question.

There are a couple of different funding mechanisms for the entire CAHOOTS program. They certainly, as a non-profit, have done a fairly good job. And White Bird, as kind of the mother ship, has done a nice job of community outreach and getting private donations to be able to help fund this.

I don’t know what year they finally kind of leaned into this and started providing public dollars, but the city of Eugene…. Every year in my budget, we have a baseline that is the status quo that exists, with some escalators for inflation, of course, for that base contract. Our base contract is the 31 hours. We added five additional hours on a one-time basis this last year during our budget process. It’s just under $1 million, the commitment that the city has made to continuing to do the CAHOOTS program.

Certainly, I think what Tim would say is the CAHOOTS program, in total, is probably right around a $2 million venture, and we’re half of that. The rest of that, I think, is through some other partners, like Lane County Sheriff’s Office, which is our county jurisdiction. Springfield, which is also in our county but is a neighbouring jurisdiction for us, also provides some of that.

The piece that’s really interesting for us right now is that we’re in a contract with them. One of the important pieces of success for any program is longevity and the ability to hire and retain the right people. I don’t know about you guys, but we’re all struggling with the labour force right now. CAHOOTS is no different.

When they negotiated a contract, they negotiated at an hourly wage that seemed right at the time. It probably needs to be refreshed, but we’re struggling in the sense that we’re in the middle of a contract year and we’re in the middle of a budget year. Making that course correction mid–budget cycle, mid-contract is never as easy as people would want it to be. I would suggest that this next year, as we come up on our new fiscal year, we’ll be having discussions on what expansion looks like.

[2:55 p.m.]

Of course, that’s always a challenging time. You say, “Hey, we want you to expand,” and CAHOOTS is going to say: “Well, we can expand as fast as we can get people hired, and that’s not been very successful.” We want to make sure we’re paying staff a wage that actually keeps them here longer than six months, just for continuity. But the public dollars are a commitment that we’ve made, so it’s a combination of public and private dollars that are funding that particular program now.

Then there are some in-kind donations that we absorb. We absorb some maintenance stuff, some vehicle stuff, some equipment stuff. But maybe the biggest in-kind donation we absorb is providing our dispatch centre as the entry point for calls for service and using our staff to triage and dispatch those. We’ve not ever monetized that, just because it’s just a part of our DNA. But it’s a fairly significant in-kind gesture when you think about staff and the resources that we need to be able to do that for 20,000 calls for service a year.

R. Singh: Thank you so much. That was very helpful.

D. Routley (Chair): If it’s anything like B.C., we have the same shortages, but also in our 911 dispatch. It takes so much training to have people ready for those positions to make those decisions.

C. Skinner: So true.

R. Glumac: Thank you so much for the presentation.

Just a question. You said that you estimate that CAHOOTS diverts 6 to 8 percent of calls from police needing to be dispatched. I guess when I hear that number, it sounds less than what I would expect. We’ve heard from some police departments that are saying that up to 70 percent of calls are related to mental health and addiction types of issues.

We’ve also heard that there’s kind of a continuum of care. Community-led responses where no police are involved is one aspect of that, which I guess would fall into the CAHOOTS category. Then there is mental health professional–led with police, working together, and then there are those that are just police themselves. I’m curious if you had any feedback on the rest of that continuum. Of that 92 percent and 94 percent of calls, do you see a further opportunity to work with mental health professionals in responses?

C. Skinner: A lot of jurisdictions have gone down the path of a co-responder model, with MHPs that are with police officers. They respond to some of those more acute calls — for instance, suicide calls that maybe don’t have weapons present or don’t pose an immediate threat but you would need law enforcement on, or that they would co-respond to those types of things.

This goes back to that comment that I made that it’s not a one-size-fits-all, because some of the jurisdictions I’ve talked to are sending their police officers to all these calls. When you think about building a system like this, it’s going to divert a ton of those calls, because what you’re doing is…. The status quo is to send your police department to all those calls. In our case, we are just not sending police to those calls. If it wasn’t for CAHOOTS, those calls would go unanswered until they got to a point where we would have to get to them. That’s not a good place to be anyway, because we are just so busy.

Many jurisdictions aren’t as busy as us. They have the resources to be able to do that. So anytime a call comes in to 911 around any kind of behavioural health issue…. The minute somebody calls and says, “I’m really, really concerned because there’s a guy running down the street with his shirt off, screaming and yelling at himself,” they send police to those. In the city of Eugene, we don’t send police to those. That’s not a criminal offence. We don’t send police to those; we would send CAHOOTS.

That’s part of it: understanding that there are just different mechanisms by which they get all of those. For us, we are starting to…. CAHOOTS is that one piece that fills that need or that bucket that we can’t get to.

There are many of these other calls that have a safety nexus to them that have a mental health component to them as well. Or there is some criminal behaviour in that. There is talk about what the dual or co-responder model looks like by having a team of officers that, with mental health professionals, are responding to those calls so you kind of have both on scene. In the event that you have safety issues and mental health issues, you can kind of feed off each other and triage those calls.

[3:00 p.m.]

Maybe more profoundly for me is…. We’re trying to get ready to build a crisis centre where we have a diversion from jail for people who are suffering from mental illness, who are engaged in criminal activity, who need a police response but don’t necessarily deserve to be in jail or should be in jail. I’m trying to create a system that has a diversion option instead of jail for those folks who are suffering from a mental health crisis or mental illness and then trying to do that.

One of the challenges we’ve had in Oregon — and Oregon is the only state in the United States that did this — is that they completely decriminalized all narcotics. Maybe not all narcotics, but they decriminalized the narcotics that we feel the effects of on the street. Heroin, methamphetamine — all those things that seem to be a contributing factor, many times, to criminal behaviour — have been decriminalized in Oregon.

The thought was that police would issue a citation instead of taking people to jail or arresting people, which is fine, and that instead of the citation for these people, they would go ahead and voluntarily enter into a system of self-evaluation and, hopefully, rehabilitation. In my opinion, what we’re seeing is that that’s just not working.

Now we have a greater population of people who are not only suffering from mental illness but are under the influence of methamphetamines or an opioid, whether it’s heroin, fentanyl or prescription drugs, which just has aggravated the problem around responding to these people. So there are a lot of different things that we need to fix about a system that needs a lot of help, and finding ways to get more mental health professionals out in the field dealing with the folks who we don’t necessarily deem as a threat to society is really a priority of ours.

R. Glumac: Just a quick follow-up. Do you have a sense of what percentage of the calls that you get that aren’t CAHOOTS calls but the remainder, where a mental health professional would be beneficial on the scene…? How many are related to mental health and addictions? Do you have a sense of that?

C. Skinner: Yeah. I think it’s anecdotal at best, Rick. It’s hard to do. Well, we could do that analytics up, although I’m not sure I’ve got that at my fingertips. We’ve got the ability to do that. It is somewhat anecdotal.

I would say that if we’re saying all calls that have a mental health aspect to them, it’s going to be a fairly signifi­cant number, because we still respond to a ton of calls in our neighborhoods that involve our unhoused individuals who are engaged in criminal activity. There’s a high, high propensity of edged weapons to be present when we’re dealing with our unhoused population.

You think about the fact that there’s that dual issue going on. You’ve got criminal behaviour with a significant safety component, and you’ve got mental health issues or substance abuse issues or both. I would say that it’s a good-sized number, and I think that’s why we’re thinking about what it might look like to have a dual response type of model. But like most police departments, safety is going to win the day when it comes to dealing with those folks and not putting MHPs in harm’s way when it comes to dealing with those calls for service.

D. Routley (Chair): I’ll just check with Dan, who’s joining us by phone.

Do you have a question, Dan?

D. Davies (Deputy Chair): No. Great conversation. But you know what? Maybe if the chief can go into a little bit more detail — he touched a bit on it — about that 911 call system.

Within your 911 system — I said I had no questions, and here I go — when that call comes in, can you walk us through what that looks like? So a 911 call comes in. It’s a mental health issue. What happens with that call? Is it handled by one person and then directed to…? What does that look like? If you could maybe take a minute and a half to just describe that process.

C. Skinner: Sure. Happy to, Dan. This is fairly typical in dispatch centres of our size. We serve the entire county. In my former job, we served two counties, so I’ve had exposure to two fairly large dispatch centres. So a call comes in on 911 or non-emergency. The first thing in our system that somebody hears when they call in is the option for police, fire or CAHOOTS.

[3:05 p.m.]

The first call that comes in is handled by a call-taker. That’s what we call them. It’s not a dispatcher; it’s a call-taker. They’re very, very skilled and experienced, basically interviewers that try to best understand what the right response is for that person’s needs. They go through a series of calls. They’re trained to go through a series of questions and answers to ascertain everything from stuff that you would expect them to ask — name, date of birth, location, what’s going on — all the way to asking, really, as many details as we can get about specifically what the call-taker is seeing so that we can match the right response for the need.

Once the call-taker has ascertained what they believe the right response is, whether it’s a police call, fire, EMS call or a CAHOOTS call, that call is shipped through our computer-aided dispatch, which is a CAD system — most systems run off CAD — to a dispatcher, who has their call screen where they have all of the resources that they have.

It’ll go to the fire position if it’s a fire. It’ll go to the police position if it’s police or CAHOOTS, and they can see what the resources are. That’s where it gets prioritized based on what’s happening at that moment in time. It can sit there for a period of time until they’re able to actually dispatch it to a resource. Or if it is elevated to a priority 1, 2 and sometimes 3, it may supersede some other things that are already on the dispatcher’s screen and immediately get dispatched.

The CAHOOTS calls immediately get dispatched to CAHOOTS. They’re very much in their vans, getting these calls coming in. Their call screen kind of stacks up with these calls. We try to prioritize them the best we can, but they have the ability to pick off the calls that they want to go to or that they see as maybe more serious. We, in our service level agreement…. If we have a piece of information that maybe CAHOOTS doesn’t have, we’re able to elevate that as well and say: “No. We need you to go to this one. We have a piece of information that suggests this one is getting really bad, and we need to get you out there.”

The system is not perfect, and oftentimes we’re criticized for why that goes through our 911 centre. Why is there not a disparate, separate system to handle these behavioural health calls for service that come in?

There are values in both, but what I would say this system does is a really good job of deconflicting, of having two separate resources being sent to the same call. It wouldn’t be uncommon for us to have, through two separate sets of eyes, interceptions — somebody calling 911 and telling us how dangerous the situation is with an individual and another one calling, say, a separate line for CAHOOTS, if they had it, and saying: “Oh, it’s just so-and-so who’s having a bad day.”

Now you’ve got police going, thinking one thing, and CAHOOTS going, thinking something else. Now you’re converging on the same call, and it’s just a recipe for disaster. So it has a tendency to deconflict that, where the left hand knows what the right hand’s doing so we can send the right response or send both.

We do dual response all the time, or we do warm hand­offs, where police go because we think it’s really dangerous, and then we get there and it actually isn’t nearly what the call-taker described. So we do a warm handoff to CAHOOTS, and we get out of there.

Conversely, CAHOOTS goes, and they think it’s just a run-of-the-mill call. They get there, and it’s somebody struggling, and they’re armed with a knife. All of a sudden now it becomes a safety issue. Then they can call us in, and we can do a warm handoff and let law enforcement do some negotiation and do some protection of the individual and anybody else that might be there.

It really is that relationship piece of being able to drift in and out of a different response type depending on what kind of call it is we’re getting.

D. Routley (Chair): Thank you. Just before I go to the next question…. It’s germane to part of what you answered, Chief. Do you find information-sharing and privacy protection laws…? Did you have to have special exemptions? Do you find that an obstacle?

C. Skinner: Yeah. That’s a great question.

The way the system is for us is…. CAHOOTS has the ability to see certain things, but they are not CJIS. For us, it’s CJIS. I don’t know what it is for you guys. It’s the criminal justice information system. The FBI governs that for us, which is basically names, dates of birth, social security numbers — all of that criminal justice history information that is protected. They don’t get to see CJIS information.

[3:10 p.m.]

Conversely, there are parts of what they do on that van, depending on what the attendant physician is allowing them to do, that probably is protected health information under PIPA that we don’t necessarily have access to. My sense is that it’s somewhat siloed in that respect.

There have been instances where, as far as confidentiality or at least exposure, shared radio frequencies have encouraged the jumping of calls and having people show up when we’re on a call that we weren’t ready for them to show up on. They’ve listened to the call, and they’ve self-dispatched or self-deployed. We’ve worked through those issues.

We have meetings every month around the operations and where we kind of have things that went really well or things that maybe we need to improve. So we very much have that ongoing dialogue about how do we stay in our own lanes, but how do we also support each other and make sure that we’re not having that kind of mission creep that often happens in both directions.

It’s kind of a long-winded way of not answering your question, which I realize, but I don’t know of any real privacy issues that have been front and centre for us at this point.

D. Routley (Chair): Go ahead, Adam.

A. Olsen: Actually, I think between the questions that Rick, Dan and Doug just asked, you covered it. I would just like to thank you, Chief, for coming in and giving this presentation.

I would just say that I missed the introduction and if it wasn’t said by the Chair, I’ll say it here or say it again. Your reputation precedes you. As we’ve been doing this work on behalf of British Columbia, CAHOOTS has got quite a reputation for the program, and it really is helpful to understand it from the time the call comes in all the way through to how you dispatch.

These are all important questions for us to have and answers for us to have on the record. I really appreciate you taking some time with us today and really hope to see some of the experience that you have inform the future here in British Columbia. I think you covered it with the previous questions.

C. Skinner: I appreciate that, Adam.

One thing that I would say, based on the conversations I’ve had all over North America, the biggest thing that people are grappling with that are trying to look at this is whether or not they do what we’ve done, which is contracted an outside provider, or they build something themselves. There are advantages and disadvantages to both of those.

I would say the outside provider provides that kind of arm’s-length relationship and provides a lot of credibility and stability to the service delivery model for the people that are receiving the service. But depending on who the provider is, they may not have a really strong foundational or organizational structure or management structure so that they grow into meeting the needs that we want.

What some have done is gone the other direction and said: okay, what government is really good at is creating structure and creating management and creating strategic plans on growth and advocating for financing. So they chose to do this internally and kind of build their own, and have their own government employees that are doing this outreach type of work.

That’s been the majority of, really, not whether we should do something like this. The question then is: how do we build it? What makes the most sense, internal or external? How do we get the money? Who’s going to run it? What’s going to be the management organizational structure and the strategic plan around it?

We here in Eugene have had something where…. Keep in mind, this is 30 years’ worth of growth to be where we’re at today. This doesn’t happen overnight. I would just encourage you to give yourselves a little bit of a break if you’re struggling with how you’re going to get this off the ground or how quickly you want to get something like this off the ground. Extending a little grace to everybody trying to do this work is really important.

G. Begg: Thank you, Chief, for your presentation.

Two quick questions. One of them might be slightly technical, and I don’t mean it to be. That is: who has the authority to apprehend a person under the Oregon mental health act?

C. Skinner: Police officers only.

G. Begg: How do you marry that up with CAHOOTS attending? That obviously necessitates an Oregon police person’s attendance, as well, to effect that.

[3:15 p.m.]

C. Skinner: What happens is this is where the external partnership sometimes gets a little bit stressed, because CAHOOTS really, really wants to make sure that law enforcement isn’t involved unless it absolutely has to be.

From time to time, we’ve seen a couple of instances where, maybe, an individual could have been or should have been deemed a danger to themselves or others. The only person that can take custody of that person is a police officer. In many cases, CAHOOTS will call us to do that, and in a couple of cases, that hasn’t happened.

Those are the kinds of conversations we have. We triage these calls and make sure we’re all kind of on the same sheet of music. That’s how that mechanism happens: if CAHOOTS goes out and it becomes clear that this person is an imminent danger to themselves or others, then they have to call in law enforcement, if that person needs to be taken into custody for a police officer hold or a mental hold for evaluation.

G. Begg: A quick follow-up to that. Are you concerned, or has the concern arisen, that you are criminalizing aberrant behaviour?

C. Skinner: Well, we always have the conversations about whether or not we’re criminalizing mental health issues or homelessness with what we do. What I would say is that a police officer hold is a civil hold, not a criminal hold. That is our ability to take somebody into physical custody and deliver them to a mental health facility or a hospital facility for evaluation, and it does not result in a criminal outcome for that individual.

The custody doesn’t feel very good, but under community caretaking, we have a duty and an ethical obligation to take custody of that person and get them to a place where they can be evaluated, for up to 72 hours, on that police officer hold. It probably doesn’t feel very good, but it’s very rarely, if ever, especially on a police officer hold or a mental health hold, where there’s a criminal outcome to that.

G. Begg: My second and last question is with regard to the percentage of occasions where Eugene police, although not initially called, have to back up CAHOOTS or are called — the calls where that happens.

C. Skinner: It’s really low, really low, which is one of the things that I talk to people about. Some of the people that don’t want to do these programs are concerned that they’re putting people in harm’s way by asking them to respond to these calls.

What I would say is: (a) if you do a good job of triaging and matching the right response with the need, that helps, and (b) if you’ve got really, really well-trained CAHOOTS people in de-escalation and everything else you’re doing, it’s very infrequently that they’re calling us for immediate help because they feel like they’re in danger. I don’t have a number for you, Garry, but it’s in the low single-digit percentage.

G. Lore: I just wanted to follow up, Chief, on a piece of what you said regarding decriminalization and whether, on the challenges you’re identifying there, you attribute them to decriminalization in and of itself. Or is that related to the comments you made around needing to build the hospital around the emergency room?

C. Skinner: Yeah, it’s around the hospital and being able to…. The decriminalization, for us, is more of a…. You know, it was voted on by our public. They’re the ones that decided to do this, and it has, I think, some connections with some other criminal behaviour that’s happening around that.

For me, the more important piece — as we continue to see people that are suffering from mental illness and continuing to suffer from substance addiction — is not having that hospital built around them to do that. The complementary piece to the decriminalization that we have not seen come to fruition is the increase in rehabilitation services to serve these people. We have a tendency to just keep responding to the same people over and over again, without that hospital built around them so that there’s someplace that they can go to get well.

[3:20 p.m.]

D. Routley (Chair): Any other questions, Members?

Our other guest we haven’t been able to reach. So I think that at this point, we’ll thank Chief Skinner for this really enlightening presentation and opportunity to ask the questions that our members have been wanting to ask you for a long time. We really, really appreciate you making yourself available.

C. Skinner: It’s been my pleasure. Just know, as you guys work through whatever it is you’re working through, that if there’s somewhere I can be value-added, I’m happy to make myself available to do that work.

I feel strongly about police reform and my profession. This is my 31st year of doing this. It’s my second organization of being a chief. I’ve seen the things that we do really well, and maybe more profoundly, I’ve seen the things that we don’t do very well, that we need to fix.

I’m happy to insert myself anywhere that you guys might see some value. Just know that that offer is always available to you.

D. Routley (Chair): That is really generous. We really, very much, do appreciate that. We’ll probably be taking you up on it. Thank you.

Deliberations

D. Routley (Chair): Members, we have time for deliberation. We’ve got a bit of a stretch here and can take a break for five or ten minutes, come back and have a half hour of deliberation, or just go straight in. I wouldn’t mind a five-minute break.

Okay. A five-minute recess.

The committee recessed from 3:21 p.m. to 3:28 p.m.

[D. Routley in the chair.]

D. Routley (Chair): I’d ask members for a motion to move in camera.

Motion approved.

The committee continued in camera from 3:29 p.m. to 4:04 p.m.

[D. Routley in the chair.]

D. Routley (Chair): Thank you, Members, for another excellent meeting.

We are out of camera, and I would ask for a motion to adjourn the meeting.

From Harwinder and seconded by Grace.

Motion approved.

The committee adjourned at 4:04 p.m.