Const. Tristan Williams and nurse Chris Nagainis belong to the Co-Response Team, a brand new VicPD/Island Health unit tasked with handling police calls with a mental-health component.
by Jack Knox, Times-Colonist - March 12, 2023
Squatting on the sidewalk, a man in a white hoodie smokes meth from a glass pipe while grooving to the tunes pounding out of his music player.
Were he in the doorway of a Government Street business, he might get shooed elsewhere, but he’s on The Block, as this tented and tattered stretch of Pandora Avenue is known.
Besides, Const. Tristan Williams and nurse Chris Nagainis are otherwise focused. They’re looking for a young man whose brother has just died suddenly. Next-of-kin notifications are already one of the grimmer tasks police do, but in this case, there’s worry that the news might tip the surviving sibling, a serious drug abuser, over the edge.
That’s why the job has fallen to this cop-and-clinician pairing. Williams and Nagainis, a nurse with long experience in mental-health and emergency-psychiatric care, belong to the Co-Response Team, a brand new VicPD/Island Health unit tasked with handling police calls with a mental-health component.
They don’t get a chance to write up their file notes, though, because a call comes in about a man who has bolted from a care facility.
He’s paranoid, delusional and has been talking about harming himself.
Williams and Nagainis pile into their unmarked SUV and cruise the streets looking for him, only to get interrupted by yet another call about a woman who, after a couple of days of heavy meth use, is in the grips of full-on drug-induced psychosis.
As calls come in to police, the CRT picks off those that appear to have a mental-health component.
The idea is for the CRT units, each with an officer and a mental health clinician partnered in an unmarked vehicle, to respond to crises traditionally handled by uniformed police alone.
Similar teams have been used, with slight variations, for years in a few other places around B.C., including Nanaimo in recent times. The model works well, supporters say, and fits the belief that police shouldn’t be the only answer to calls that are primarily about mental health.
The CRT members — two cops, two registered nurses — have desks next to those of the department’s three community-resource officers.
The room also houses the officer attached to the five Island Health-led Assertive Community Treatment teams — made up of psychiatric nurses, addiction-recovery workers, registered nurses, social workers, and so on — who care for well over 300 people, most of them in Greater Victoria’s core, whose severe mental illness is often compounded by substance abuse.
The units that share the VicPD office all have different missions, but there’s still some crossover, as well as a sameness of approach. “Handshakes and hugs, not handcuffs,” is Preston’s shorthand description.
Of course, it can get more complicated than that once they leave the building. Some people argue police shouldn’t be the ones to respond to mental-health calls at all, but at ground level, the lines between public-safety matters and health matters aren’t always so clearly defined.
“In reality, they intersect,” Preston says. There’s overlap, particularly when the people in question are at risk of causing harm to themselves or others.
As Williams drives to the call about the woman experiencing psychosis, Nagainis, tapping on his keyboard, brings up health records that give the two men a much more complete picture of who they’ll be dealing with, what the complicating factors might be, and what might lead to a better outcome.
The new approach is a learning curve for everyone. Even as a cop who has long gravitated to mental-health calls (“You get the chance to proactively help people”), Williams has found the CRT way of doing things an adjustment.
This is new territory for all of them, figuring things out as they go along, but it seems like so far, so good.
The CRT is made up of just four people — two nurses, two police officers — who take turns providing coverage from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. each day. Their footprint is limited to VicPD territory, which means Victoria and Esquimalt.
What happens if the crisis happens after 8 p.m., or in, say, Saanich or Oak Bay?