This is awesome. The stories they share in the article really go to show that this makes a big difference for helping people. When we talk about police reform, this is the kind of thing we should be advocating, not “defunding”
This is defunding. The funding is taken away from the police and used to hire nurses.
I don’t think any funding was removed here. The police already have a budget to work with specialists like mental health professionals and addictions counsellors. I think the experiment here was simply using that same framework for ER nurses.
I’d call it enhancing the police response or providing additional support.
A team of a nurse or social worker + cop is the alternative to (generally) 2 cops. Whatever the funding mechanism behind the doors, you’re switching out a cop for an alternative person, which is exactly what the defund movement has always been asking for. See some quotes below:
https://defundthepolice.org/alternatives-to-police-services/
The police service is a dangerous option for people experiencing a mental health crisis—but for many, it’s the only option. By defunding the police, significant resources can be reallocated to create a new community emergency services to support the mental health needs of our vulnerable community members. Teams trained in de-escalation and who root their work in community-informed practices could provide crisis support and care.
…
One common refrain in opposition to defunding the police assumes that our society will not be able to effectively respond to violent crime. But we have to remember that police do not prevent violence. In most incidents of violent crime, police are responding to a crime that has already taken place. When this happens, what we need from police is a service that will investigate the crime, and perhaps prevent such crimes from occurring in future.
Policing is ill-equipped to suit these needs. When victims are not the right kinds of victims, police have utterly failed, and at times refused to take the threat seriously. Why would we rely on an institution that has consistently proven that it is rife with systemic anti-Blackness and other forms of discrimination that result in certain communities being deemed unworthy of support? Instead of relying on police, we could rely on investigators from other sectors to carry out investigations. Social workers, sociologists, forensic scientists, doctors, researchers, and other well-trained individuals to fulfill our needs when violent crimes take place.
…
If we were to defund the police, we could create new investigative services where diverse teams of researchers and investigators, with a mix of scientific, public health and sociological expertise are able to attend to our investigative needs without the inherent anti-Blackness with which the police services approach our unsolved cases. Additionally, we could put money into programs attending to the food security and housing security needs of people living in precarity, to reduce the likelihood that desperate people unable to have their basic needs met would resort to the extraordinary step of attempting to meet their needs through theft.
I don’t think the article explicitly says how the program is funded. However, the nurse they highlight “normally works in the emergency department at Windsor Regional Hospital” and they talk about the program also reducing visits to the ER. So, I doubt the WPS is paying the nurse’s salary.
Always defund police. We don’t need them and this is a prime example of that.
They are just a boot.
An ER nurse wouldn’t feel safe walking the streets on their own. The pairing of someone trained in protecting and someone trained in healing is clearly working well given the content of the article.
In Europe, its not uncommon for nurses and paramedics to volunteer on weekend nights around cities, primarily to supplement the underfunded and understaffed ambulance service by patrolling with a first aid kit and defibrillator since it gets easy credits towards their degrees. While there is a working relationship with Police, its pretty established in those roles that keeping the cops at a bit of a distance tends to be for the better. If you have the cops about, people tend to lie more and get worse care because of it. They also tend to consent less. I’m not saying incidents don’t happen, but having cops about causes more of then than it prevents.
someone trained in protecting
I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a cop protecting anything other than a storefront
Okay so send them with another nurse or some security.
Security officers are wayyy different from cops.
Does a regular street cop really need 2 pairs of handcuffs and an AR-15 mag strapped to her stomach?
Handcuffs yes. Magazine, no but obviously she had space so, eh? It saves a moment of strapping a bandolier on when you get the trunk gun out and most people probably don’t even notice it.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Nurse Abbas Haidar and his Windsor Police partner were nearing the end of their shift when a group of panicked teenagers burst from an alley and ran toward their cop car.
The goal was to divert patients with mental illness and substance-use struggles from the city’s two overwhelmed emergency departments by offering them medical care on the streets, with police on hand to keep the nurses safe.
Armed with a list of frequent ER visitors with mental-health challenges, the nurse-police pairs pro-actively offered them medical care and social-service referrals, cutting their trips to the emergency department nearly in half over the 30 days after their interaction with the team.
At the same event, the chief said two long-standing programs pairing police officers with social workers from another local hospital, Hôtel-Dieu Grace Healthcare, would be merged into a Crisis Response Team.
Windsor, like many places in Canada, has been forced to rethink how it provides policing and health care services amid rising homelessness and a mental-health and addictions crisis that has grown worse since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Hospital brass vowed to expedite care for people experiencing mental-health crises, beginning with code announcements that treated patients in mental distress with the same urgency as those with serious physical injuries.
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