Thursday, October 2, 2025
Ottawa Police Service launches first Mobile Crisis Response Team
(Ottawa) — The Ottawa Police Service (OPS) has recently launched its first Mobile Crisis Response Team (MCRT), a new initiative designed to provide immediate, specialized support to individuals experiencing mental health or substance use crises.
The MCRT pairs a specially trained police officer from the OPS Mental Health Unit with a mental health professional from The Ottawa Hospital’s Mobile Crisis Team. Together, they will respond to calls across the city, offering on-scene support, de-escalation, and connections to community services.
The initial team will operate Tuesday to Friday, during extended weekday hours of either 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. or 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. The OPS is also exploring the addition of a second team in the future to expand coverage and further strengthen support.
“People in crisis need the right help at the right time,” says Mental Health Unit Sgt. Dodd Tapp. “By combining police expertise with mental health care, this team ensures compassionate, culturally informed, and effective support while keeping the community and our members safe.”
The creation of the MCRT reflects a growing recognition that mental health and substance use crises are complex and often require a coordinated, team-based approach. By pairing a police officer with a mental health professional, the team can respond quickly, provide immediate assistance, and connect individuals to follow-up services. This approach is expected to resolve more incidents in the community, reduce the need for apprehensions under the Mental Health Act, and ease demand on hospital emergency departments.
To support the launch, the OPS consulted with an MCRT working group made up of mental health professionals, community service providers, and individuals with lived experience. Together, they developed recommendations to guide how the team operates and presents itself, with a focus on balancing professionalism and approachability, clearly defining roles, and ensuring effective service delivery.
This program builds on earlier OPS initiatives that trained officers to better understand mental health issues, communicate effectively, and de-escalate tense situations. By combining those skills with the expertise of mental health clinicians, the MCRT offers a more complete and compassionate response that benefits individuals in crisis and the broader community.
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The introduction of the OPS’ Mobile Crisis Response Teams (MCRT) is being hailed as a new initiative despite a near-identical program having existed from 2012 to 2015. In 2015, the partnership collapsed, with experts questioning whether this program was a good use of psychiatrists’ time. Formalizing new protocols that embed police into mental health crisis response should be alarming to all residents. These programs risk criminalization instead of care, coercion instead of support, and the continued erosion of trust between communities and the services that are supposed to help them. The recommendations from the Abdirahman Abdi inquest reinforced this evidence, showing that police involvement in mental health crises can escalate harm rather than prevent it. Furthermore, the MCRT undermines the work of the new ANCHOR mental health response system that is truly non-police. The problem is that 911, which is still run by the OPS, only sends calls to ANCHOR if it deems them “non-violent”. So, if a call like Abdi’s, where a Black man having a mental health crisis was touching women, came in today, 911 would deem it “violent”, and the police would be sent, likely with the same deadly outcome. The OPS needs to get completely out of mental health response and give the money it gets for it to ANCHOR.