Officials optimistic about new crisis response unit

Law enforcement and health officials are optimistic about the new Brandon Police Service crisis response unit, which is expected to be fully operational on Oct. 20.

The unit will consist of two pairings of one BPS officer and one Prairie Mountain Health psychiatric nurse, and it will respond specifically to mental health calls, Brandon police Chief Tyler Bates told the Sun.

By adding this unit, Bates said he hopes it will de-escalate situations where a person is in crisis with an empathetic and supportive wellness response, provide faster and more efficient responses to people in crisis and connect them with the right services.

Additionally, he said one of the goals is to reduce the overall number of mental health calls as a result of proactive engagement and community outreach.

“As much as police take note of certain services that are provided in the community, when you’ve got somebody embedded within Prairie Mountain Health that is working with you, they know who their colleagues are, they know who the specialists are that can provide that necessary intervention,” he said.

Brandon West MLA Wayne Balcaen, who was the city’s chief of police from 2017 to 2023, called the new unit a “game-changer” for BPS.

He acknowledged that police officers receive training in various areas, including mental health and addictions, but said they are not professionals and deal disproportionately with people in mental health crises.

“Police are not the experts in this, but these individuals that are mental health professionals are, and they will be able to deal with (people in crisis) at a different level and probably have connections within the community,” he said. “It puts the right people with the right services.”

Brandon isn’t the first city to pair up officers with mental health professionals.

In 2021, the Winnipeg Police Service launched a pilot project called Alternative Response to Citizens in Crisis (ARCC) and it has since become a permanent resource.

ARCC is a partnership between WPS and Shared Health’s crisis response centre. ARCC responds to non-criminal and low-risk crisis situations with a uniformed police officer and a mental health professional, according to Shared Health’s website.

During ARCC’s pilot period in 2022, the team made 822 engagements with 530 different people, with 82 per cent of those visits resolved with ARCC intervention alone and 18 per cent resulting in linkages or referrals to other services, according to WPS’s Pilot Project Year-end Review.

ARCC has made 2,624 engagements so far in 2025, WPS said in a statement to the Sun.

“The unit is an invaluable resource to Police, Health, and most importantly the people we serve in providing person centred, trauma informed care,” the statement read.

Not everyone is a fan of the approach, however.

Christopher Schneider and Ania Theuer, a professor and assistant professor in Brandon University’s Department of Sociology, both say that mental health calls should be left to mental health professionals.

“If police continue to say that they are not in the business of mental health crisis response, then perhaps we should start listening to them in that matter,” Theuer said.

She said the focus should be on building infrastructure around mental health and creating an integrated mental health crisis team where police are not the first responders.

Schneider agreed and said pairing up police officers with mental health professionals is a Band-Aid solution to the issue of not having enough mental health infrastructure.

He also said police often perceive people experiencing a mental health crisis as threatening.

“The perception of mentally ill persons as … disorderly or dangerous is largely a baseless assumption that’s not strongly supported by the empirical evidence,” he said.

Bates, defending BPS’s approach, said interventions naturally pose a risk to the public and the person responding.

“There will be instances where the psychiatric nurse might take a lead in the discussions and the engagement process, and there will be instances where there’s an escalated threat … If you respond to a call to a citizen in crisis, and they’re armed with a weapon that presents a real present danger, that speaks to the need for a police officer to be present,” he said.

Prairie Mountain Health operates a mobile crisis unit, which is staffed solely by mental health and addictions professionals and has been successful, Prairie Mountain Health wrote in a statement to the Sun.

It said joining with BPS for a joint response team has been a “long-standing goal” and will allow the health authority to respond to “more complex scenarios where safety is a concern.”

“This model provides an alternative to a police-only response and reduces reliance on emergency departments for crisis care where safety is a concern. It ensures that individuals receive appropriate support while considering safety,” the statement read.

» sanderson@brandonsun.com