Toronto to launch $12M ‘safety and well-being’ plan to combat community violence, support mental health

Mayor John Tory is endorsing an initial $12-million for a community-safety plan released Wednesday

Thestar.com
Jan. 20, 2022
Jennifer Pagliaro and David Rider

On the heels of one of Toronto’s bloodiest years, the city’s 10-year community safety and well-being plan will launch with just over $12 million in funding if city council approves.

The new “SafeTO” program is the latest, significant effort to funnel resources to neighbourhoods struggling with gun violence and other crises after similar plans previously approved by council have seen a lack of political will and funding.

This time around, the 2022 work plan proposes: the launching of non-police crisis teams to respond to mental health calls in a pilot project; bolstering the work of a team that responds to community needs after gunfire; and creating a new office dedicated to preventing gun violence.

“We all want a safer Toronto,” said Mayor John Tory said in a planned press conference Wednesday to endorse the strategy.

“This report makes it clear that this is a top priority and that we are prepared as a city to put the resources and the people behind it to make it happen.”

The proposal going to Tory’s executive committee on Jan. 26 comes after the province rewrote the Police Services Act to focus on community-driven approaches to safety in 2019. Under those changes, all municipalities were required to prepare community safety plans by 2021, which Toronto did.

But the new Community Safety and Policing Act does not require funding for those plans from the province nor has Premier Doug Ford’s government committed any.

The city’s plan to implement SafeTO comes after another pandemic year with more than 80 homicides -- one of the highest tallies in recent decades -- more than half of them involving guns. Already this year, four of seven homicides have seen victims under the age of 25.

The city’s funding must be approved separately as part of the city’s overall budget process. It is currently included in the budget proposed by city staff.

While $12 million is a small slice of the city’s overall $15-billion operating budget, it would be a significant step for council.

It took years for the city to say it was fully implementing the $15-million Toronto Youth Equity Strategy to combat youth violence, first approved in 2014.

And a previous 10-year anti-gun violence plan approved by city council in 2014, totalling $50 million, relied entirely on funding from the other levels of government. Today, it remains largely unfunded despite election promises from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals.

“We’ve been patiently pursuing that, minister after minister, election after election,” Tory said during his press conference. “It’s time, I think, for that money to come forward.”

The three programs recommended for funding this year look at key areas in need of immediate response as well as a central hub to co-ordinate efforts and collect data to inform city policy and strategy.

The crisis-team pilot project acknowledges police are not always required or wanted to see peaceful outcomes following painful tragedies for Black and Indigenous residents and people of colour in Toronto.

It will see local, established organizations like the Black Health Alliance working together in four different areas of the city to provide critical and appropriate supports for people experiencing a mental health crisis. Each area will have mobile teams of community health nurses, crisis counsellors and others who work around the clock, and relevant followup services.

The SafeTO plan will add $8.6 million in funding for that program.

A separate community crisis response program, which has been operating since 2008, will also get a boost. After gunfire incidents, this team moves in to work with local communities in a culturally sensitive way to access psychological services, community debriefs, peer support groups and other supports as needed.

With a 39 per cent increase in firearm-related incidents between 2017 and 2020, the city implementation plan says, the team does not have the kind of surge capacity it needs to properly respond. Funding of just over $2 million will be used to hire six full-time positions to allow a more nimble seven-day model.

Lastly, the city is looking to create a Toronto Office to Prevent Gun Violence, based on successful models in London, Oakland and elsewhere. Funding of $1.4 million would allow different city officials -- from police to school boards -- to co-ordinate the response to and prevention of these incidents and collect centralized data to better inform real-time decisions about how to deploy resources as well as understand why there is conflict in neighbourhoods, among other efforts.

The city plan to establish a gun violence prevention office was welcomed by Ottawa-based criminologist Irvin Waller, author of “Science and Secrets of Ending Violent Crime” who has, for years, been advocating for such an approach.

“I think that is extraordinarily good news, if we are ever going to see a significant reduction in the numbers of people killed by gun violence and the numbers of people injured and traumatized by gun violence,” Waller said.

He noted, however, that the proposed staffing level -- nine full-time employees -- was a minimum of what’s likely to be required.

“This is so overdue.”