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Sharing Further Phase 2 Findings - Deeper Dive into 2021 Mental Health Apprehension Data

Today, we are posting a second release on mental health apprehensions, diving deeper into 2021 data. This release follows our preliminary findings, published on January 21, 2024, which revealed lower likelihoods of apprehension in the Black and Latino communities and higher likelihoods in the White and East/Southeast Asian communities.

Working collaboratively with the CAP (Community Advisory Panel), our members, and stakeholder contact groups, the Service has continued to formulate and test new questions to better understand the interaction.

For example:

• Are there differences by race in the decision to arrest or apprehend people in crisis?
• Do racial disparities in mental health apprehensions persist when it was a family member or friend who called police to the occurrence location?
• Do racial disparities in mental health apprehensions change across different neighbourhoods in the city?

Exploring these questions has provided key insights:

• The majority of mental health apprehensions were associated with persons in crisis; further police responded to the majority of these interactions following a reactive call for service. 
• Very few persons in crisis calls for service resulted in an arrest; however, when they did, Black and Indigenous people were over-represented.
• Black youth were particularly under-represented in mental health apprehensions when coming into contact with police.
• Toronto neighbourhoods with higher inequities in well-being indicators experienced lower rates of mental health apprehensions relative to enforcement actions. Rates decreased further for Black people.

We will continue to unpack what is behind the patterns revealed in this release through further data exploration and internal and external consultations.