"That's the way the system should work," said Steve Lurie, Executive Director of the Canadian Mental Health Association, Toronto branch. Mental health advocates are praising Toronto police after officers spent hours negotiating with an armed man experiencing a mental health crisis on a TTC bus over the weekend, eventually arresting him without firing their guns. Of those calls, police apprehended 8,689 people under the Mental Health Act and used force 158 times or 1.8 per cent of the time. - Steve Lurie, Canadian Mental Health AssociationBut Saturday's case ended very differently:The Emergency Task Force (ETF) and a psychiatrist negotiated with the 21-year-old man for about five hours. 'Expectation of the job'McLean says half the calls he responded to when he worked at 51 Division were for people in a mental health crisis.

Source: CBC News August 02, 2016 23:39 UTC