FROM FEBRUARY/MARCH 2024 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX

In 2012, seeking new ways to improve community safety, the Toronto police identified a little-known initiative being used in a small Saskatchewan city as a possible model to emulate.

In the early aughts, Prince Albert, an hour and a half north of Saskatoon, was overwhelmed with what felt like a ceaseless wave of violent crime. On a yearly basis, its police department was receiving as many 911 calls as it had residents: 35,000, with only 100 officers to field them. Inevitably, local social services were struggling to assist those falling through its social safety net as a result of stabbings, substance abuse and domestic violence.

“We were just dying,” Sgt. Brent Kalinowski told the Winnipeg Free Press in 2013. “Our stats were going through the roof. It was like you were trying to bail out a sinking ship.”

Like Toronto, Prince Albert had looked outward for solutions to its degenerating position, and found them in Scotland’s most populous city, Glasgow. Once “Europe’s murder capital,” the city had successfully halved violent deaths and drastically reduced weapons possession, thanks to its newly minted Violence Reduction Unit, which emphasized engaging and empowering community members in order to collectively target the societal roots of violence.

After a long round-trip flight to learn more in person, Prince Albert’s city leaders implemented its own simply named initiative: Community Mobilization Prince Albert (CMPA). At its core was something called the “situation table,” where for at least one hour each week, there was a dedicated space for police and social services to meet to present situations of elevated risk that would benefit from having multiple agencies work together to help someone in need within 24 to 48 hours. And it worked: Violent crime decreased, with more families getting the support they needed.

After seeing evidence that Glasgow’s approach to community safety and well-being could be replicated in Canada, representatives from the City of Toronto, Toronto Police Service and United Way elected to launch their own initiative, to be piloted in Rexdale, with meetings officially starting in January 2013. Now 10 years old, FOCUS (Furthering Our Community by Uniting Services) – a de facto police diversion program – sits at the centre of the conversation about which institutions should be funded, and defunded, to better help those living in dire straits.

At the time, Rexdale was seen one-dimensionally by the rest of Toronto as an inner suburb rife with criminal activity. Rob Ford was recorded smoking crack in a Rexdale bungalow within a month of the first official situation table in the neighbourhood. The “Summer of the Gun” and the subsequent media frenzy almost a decade prior had forced upon Rexdale a reputation for drug, gun and gang violence. National newspapers were comfortable using apocalyptic descriptors (“blighted,” “violence-plagued”) and anti-Muslim sentiment (“the wilds of Islamic Rexdale”) to describe the neighbourhood’s day-to-day.

Althea Martin-Risden, currently the director of health promotion at the Rexdale Community Health Centre, has been around since FOCUS’s inception in her neighbourhood. The health centre was part of the exploratory phase of the initiative, with staff even going to Saskatchewan to learn more about Prince Albert’s Hub Model. In the first two years of Rexdale’s situation tables, the centre served as lead agency for more FOCUS submissions than any other founding agency.

“It was definitely bumpy,” Martin-Risden recalls of the program’s early days. “People had to navigate their roles and to learn the nuances of working together.” But despite those hiccups, a collaborative dynamic was struck early by the partner organizations, she says, many of which had already been working together for years. “One of the nice things about this [process] was that agencies here in Rexdale have always been supportive of each other and been good partners with each other. I think that’s why people put the effort in to make it work: It was very evident from the beginning that this would be something that really was a benefit for the community.”

At a FOCUS situation table, agencies identify individuals, groups, or even places facing “acutely elevated risk,” that is, imminent risk of harm if a person doesn’t get help right away. Tables follow a strict four-filter process to assess if a multi-agency intervention is required (as opposed to a direct referral to a particular group) and protect the privacy of those involved. For a case to present imminent risk, a majority of participants at the table must vote that it does, referring to a list of 106 possible risk factors, ranging from nutritional needs not being met to evidence of extremist ideology being accepted in the home.

Evon Smith, United Way’s FOCUS senior manager, offers an example of an intervention for a family in the process of being evicted: One of the family members has severe mental illness and has been assaulting people in the complex.

“So a lawyer might get involved, a housing worker might get involved to advocate for the eviction not to happen, [...] a psychiatrist might get involved to up a medication and so forth and so on,” explains Smith. “All that will happen right in the meeting. You get that immediate support to mitigate immediate risk.”

Since the successful pilot in Rexdale in 2013, FOCUS has expanded several times over the next 10 years. Today, FOCUS Toronto has an additional five situation tables in Black Creek, York, Downtown West, Downtown East and Scarborough. It’s so ubiquitous in Toronto that only one Toronto police division – Division 55 – does not sit at a table. According to an end-of-year report, in 2022 FOCUS reviewed 1,103 situations, intervening 97 per cent of the time and successfully reducing imminent risk of harm in 82 per cent of cases.

“The whole theory behind the [FOCUS] model is that risk factors combine in unique ways ... to cause the crisis, the harm and the victimization that we see,” explains Sgt. Brian Smith, FOCUS’s lead police coordinator. “So if you can address those upstream, then you can prevent crisis.”

In the program, any agency can bring a situation to the table. But data from FOCUS’s annual report showed that in 2022, most FOCUS situations originated with the Toronto police, with health and housing agencies responding the most frequently.

Smith attributes this to the TPS’s 24/7 patrols. “The vast majority of agencies aren’t in the crisis business…They may be Monday to Friday, nine to five, and people come through the front door.

“From a police perspective, if we’re already at the 911 call, we’re in a position to identify if there’s a need there to then make the referral to those upstream agencies to then prevent another crisis,” he adds.

If a FOCUS intervention is warranted, relevant agencies huddle and plan one accordingly, with one agency leading and others assisting. Situation tables are designed to mitigate risk quickly, so teams are required to connect with those in crisis within 24 to 48 hours.

A teacher-turned-social worker, Pila Dube sat on some of the first FOCUS tables in Rexdale. She still attends 10 years on. Dube facilitates the Rexdale Women’s Centre’s Partner Assault Response (PAR) program, a court-mandated counselling program for those who’ve been charged with domestic violence.

“The advantage that we’re having – dealing with these clients directly from the police – is that we get to provide safety plans for those women while they’re still waiting for their cases to be dealt with in the court hearing system,” explains Dube. “The justice system can take about one year to process a domestic case. What is happening to the victim during this time? That’s when we are bridging that gap.”

The risk factors FOCUS addresses vary greatly, with tables dealing with everything from domestic violence to newcomer settlement issues to unemployment. However, the risk factor FOCUS addresses the most is mental health (more than twice as often as the second-most-common issue, “antisocial/ negative behaviour”). It holds the top spot across all age groups under the age of 60, including youth, the most common age demographic in FOCUS submissions.

Since Toronto Community Housing supervisor Tiffany Lambert began attending FOCUS’s two downtown tables six years ago, she says they’ve “changed the game” as to how she interacts with tenants suffering with mental health and addiction issues.

“Before, if you had a tenant telling you they had 14 different things that were wrong, it was really hard for you to figure out where to go first,” Lambert recounts. “Now, staff feel more equipped to say: ‘This is FOCUS. I’m sending it to FOCUS.’ And we can get it done right away and be able to mobilize all those supports at the same time with the help of other agencies.”

If another FOCUS agency can step in quickly and de-escalate the tenant’s acute mental health crisis, then Lambert can immediately address the tenant’s housing predicament: “If we’re dealing with them faster, they’re not growing to the level of severity that they were back in the day,” she says.

She recalls parents who’ve explained that their children react negatively to law enforcement and want to consider alternative routes; or the parent who asked if Lambert could bring in a female officer rather a male one, as her child would react more positively to that if police intervention was deemed necessary.

Manpreet Parhar first discovered the city’s weekly situation tables while articling with the Rexdale Community Legal Clinic, where her supervisor asked if she wanted to shadow. Now one of the clinic’s staff lawyers, she attends Rexdale’s FOCUS table when she’s available. While the clinic more often serves as an assisting agency in situations, Parhar says a seat at the table not only contributes to informing other local community organizations about the clinic’s resources, but also serves as a means of outreach in directly educating residents about their legal rights.

As the city’s housing crisis gets worse with every year, she says this is particularly valuable when it comes to evictions due to rental arrears. It’s the single biggest risk factor the Rexdale clinic is responding to, whether through FOCUS or its general intake.

“As a legal clinic that serves low-income residents in our catchment area, being at the table and occupying that space really allows us to get involved at the front end of things,” explains Parhar, “as opposed to somebody who’s been evicted coming to us maybe the day before the eviction, because they don’t yet know what their rights are.”

While it’s a de facto police diversion program, FOCUS isn’t an initiative that seeks to reallocate, redirect, or reduce funding from the Toronto police.

Academic research from Toronto Metropolitan University looked at FOCUS interventions between 2014 and 2020, and found that there was a 68.75 per cent reduction in police being contacted in the three years following a FOCUS intervention.

However, despite illustrating that FOCUS was responsible for less police demand, in its 2023 budget request the Toronto Police referred to the research as an example of “operational success” when asking for $48.3 million more in funding over the previous year.

The City of Toronto funds its police service to the tune of $1.2 billion, with the revised budget most recently put forward by Mayor Olivia Chow allocating an additional $20 million. According to the Toronto Star, adjusted for inflation, the police’s net budget grew by 32 per cent between 1999 and 2023, while the city’s shelter, support and housing division only grew by seven per cent. Initiatives like the city’s Community Partnership and Investment Program, on the other hand, were allocated the same amount ($25 million) shared among 231 community agencies in 2023 as in the previous year, with no increase to match inflation. After inflation, it amounts to a 6.7 per cent cut, say advocates. The Canadian Mental Health Association – listed in FOCUS’s last end-of-year report as a participating agency – has urged the provincial government to increase support for the community mental health and addictions sector to make up for “decades of underfunding.”

It’s important to note that member agencies who participate in FOCUS don’t receive funding for engaging in the program. Agencies’ leadership must decide internally to allocate existing resources to participate.

In fact, during the pilot phase, one participating agency, Youth Employment Services Toronto, stopped operating in Toronto due to a city-wide funding cut.

When asked if increasing the police budget and stagnating social service funding puts FOCUS at risk, Sgt. Smith acknowledges that there’s a problem with underfunding the supports people need. “Sometimes our [FOCUS] interventions aren’t successful. The percentage that aren’t, it’s because – let’s say the person needs housing. Well, there is no housing. Or the person needs an addiction program. Well, there’s waitlists. Can they wait six to eight months? So that’s a challenge.”

Still, he says, “Police are the first to say we love to see upstream investments,” and affirmed that he was pushing that message upward to other members of FOCUS’s leadership.

The question of how community safety initiatives should be funded exists beyond the borders of Toronto. Claire Wilmot, a former researcher at the University of Toronto’s Global Justice Lab, found that the Ministry of the Solicitor General only allocated one per cent of its community safety and well-being funding to non-police community organizations and service providers between 2019 and 2022. Data analysis by the West End Phoenix found that for 2022-2026, that number is projected to decrease to half a percent. The Ontario Ministry of the Solicitor General did not respond to a request for comment.

The data shows that it’s not that less money is going to community-based, not-for-profit organizations, it’s that the ministry is just giving more to police, with an additional $112 million budgeted to go to police boards between 2022 and 2026.

The trend seen at the municipal and provincial level is also present at the federal level: In 2018, when Public Safety Canada granted more than a million dollars from the federal Community Resilience Fund to expand FOCUS Toronto’s counter radicalization initiatives, the funding went to the Toronto police.

Wilmot says it can be easier for police to make compelling cases justifying their need for funding to anxious city residents because the metrics by which they measure success are more clear cut, even if she thinks their logic is flawed.

“[Police] are able to frame what they’re doing in ways that have some kind of socio-political resonance,” explains Wilmot. “‘The crime rates are rising? We’ve made this many more charges, this many more arrests.’ Whereas ‘The crime rates are rising? We’ve served this many people with complex mental health needs.’ It doesn’t have the same punch,” even if a mental health intervention is more likely to get someone in crisis the help they need. A study published in the journal Canadian Public Policy examined the police forces of Canada’s 20 largest municipalities and found “no consistent correlation” between higher police spending and reducing crime rates, despite police budgets consistently increasing across Canada over the last decade.

While FOCUS hasn’t yet publicly reckoned with the question of resources, the Saskatchewan model that inspired it has. In 2019, Community Mobilization Prince Albert closed its Centre of Responsibility, which provided logistical support to Prince Albert’s situation tables. According to the CBC, the centre closed because its partner agencies had a hard time finding employees to assign to the association: “We came to the realization that we just don’t have [...] the human resources here locally in Prince Albert to be able to confidently move forward with the plan,” said one CMPA steering committee co-chair.

In an email to the West End Phoenix, Prince Albert Police Service inspector Scott Hayes said that because of continued “human resource challenges,” the HUB’s steering committee decided to temporarily suspend operations in June 2023, with situation tables coming to a halt. Hayes said the challenges faced by agencies were not financial in nature, but he did not explain what specifically were the human resources lacking. Hayes said the temporary pause would be re-evaluated in April.

Scerena Officer, the City of Toronto’s FOCUS lead, says that over the next 10 years, the program will look for new and better ways for the community to be more involved in FOCUS. She says when the program began, it aimed not to replace existing mechanisms, but rather to enhance, leverage and coordinate what exists, which it’s done.

“We continue to work with our partners to look at how best to support their ability as an organization to apply for resources and funding that can support them in doing their work, which then allows them to be further engaged with FOCUS,” she says.

Since FOCUS’s creation in 2013, its model has been replicated in more than 100 other communities across Ontario, because it addresses the realization that you can’t just arrest everyone who’s facing a crisis. While the official plan is to keep FOCUS running through the next decade, and possibly longer, a program this important to a city like Toronto should not be subject to chronic underfunding. As Toronto’s affordability crisis gets worse and concerns for public safety get more media attention, Torontonians can rest knowing half the solution is in place. The other half lies in funding it.

This story is supported by the Joe Burke Fund for Social Justice Reporting, which was created in memory of Joe Burke, the late social justice advocate and lawyer.