January 20, 2026 at City Hall
Toronto has created a model community-based crisis service. It is noncoercive, and is composed of a diversity of people who bring a vital range of experience. Most notably, many of the staff are from the communities of people who have been most at risk of use of force on police calls – people with personal experience of having had crises in their lives, people who are members of Black and Indigenous communities. I’ve profiled The Toronto Community Crisis Services (TCCS) in a number of international forums, to great positive response.
Why, you may wonder, are you having the unusual experience of an organization appearing in order to heap praise on what you have done?
The work is not done. It needs to grow to meet the demand.
The Toronto Community Crisis Service (TCCS) has successfully diverted a large percentage of mental health crisis calls from police, with 78-89% of transferred 911 calls handled without police involvement, resolving tens of thousands of incidents since its 2022 launch, including over 34,000 calls by late 2025. In most cases, TCCS teams did not require other emergency services, requesting police attendance in only about 2.5% of calls attended. This initiative has led to a decrease in the number of mental health calls handled by Toronto Police, who have reported a steady decline after 2021.
The Toronto Police Service (TPS) is now considering further reducing their involvement in mental health calls by withdrawing the Mobile Crisis Intervention Teams (MCIT), which are response units consisting of a police officer and a hospital-based nurse. This form of response was never asked for by the people who most often experienced crises. When consulted before MCIT’s founding, what people said they needed was a noncoercive, community-based alternative that bypassed police altogether. Now that alternative exists. And it has achieved exactly what everyone wanted. Instead of members of the public or families calling 911 when people get to a state that other people find disturbing, most often the people in crisis themselves are calling TCCS before this point. Satisfaction with the service is very high, by clients and the public. People are left with their dignity, as well as their safety.
TCCS needs further resources to keep meeting the need of Torontonians. In some cases the police must respond to crisis calls simply because they are the only service funded adequately to respond immediately. If everyone agrees that the TCCS response is the best possible option, and police resources have been saved by TCCS picking up calls that formerly went to them, this should mean that some of the 1.43 billion that the police are scheduled to receive in 2026 could instead be directed to TCCS. Police, it must be acknowledged, will still have some mh calls they must attend, and mh issues can come up on any call, so they must continue to be trained accordingly. But there could still be less police involvement.
We must also consider the driver of crises and the impediments to lasting resolutions for people in crisis. We don’t want to just respond to crises, we need to prevent them. Housing scarcity and insecurity loom large here. Contrary to popular belief, lack of housing causes mental health problems more than the reverse. In terms of costs – human and financial – it is more cost effective to provide housing than it is to respond to crises and keep people in shelters, jails and hospitals.
So we also ask for support to be directed to affordable accessible housing. Accessibility in mental health terms is rarely considered. But critical to housing some people with mental health issues is adequate sound proofing. Edmond Yu and Andrew Loku would not have been in a position to be shot by police if they had homes where sound was not so easily carried. Also worth noting in terms of types of housing required, is that in many cases a superior alternative to supportive housing is the provision of flexible supports that follow the person, so people can move and keep continuity of care, and have ebbing and flowing needs without their housing having to change or be lost altogether.
None of us are immune from reaching a crisis point or from the eventual need for housing that is accessible. Let us take care of each other by providing for it.