The Abdirahman Abdi inquest is being livestreamed during the day here.
When the Ottawa Police Service’s (OPS) mental health unit launched in 2000, it had five members — a figure that remains the same today despite a high proportion of use-of-force incidents involving people in crisis, a coroner’s inquest is hearing.
Abdirahman Abdi, 38, was a Somali-Canadian man who struggled with his mental health. He died in July 2016 after a violent police arrest. The inquest is diving into the circumstances of his death in an effort to prevent other people from meeting the same fate.
Sgt. Dodd Tapp, who leads the mental health unit, was asked on Day 11 of the inquest how many officers he has on a daily basis.
“The short answer? Not enough,” Tapp said Monday. He went on to explain how some days the unit maxes out at four officers, two per shift, calling it a “minimal-sized unit.”
Lawrence Greenspon, one of the lawyers representing Abdi’s family at the inquest, put it more bluntly.
“I appreciate that you don’t want to bite the hand that feeds you, but that hand has been underfeeding you for a long time,” Greenspon said while cross-examining Tapp.
Tapp did not argue with that assertion, replying: “We do what we need to do.”
What the unit does
Mental health unit (MHU) officers respond to calls involving people in crisis. They also partner with mobile mental health professionals from The Ottawa Hospital on some calls, deliver internal training to OPS officers on de-escalation tactics and conduct checks on people involved in previous mental health calls.
If a call involves both criminality and mental health, front-line officers would lead the response with MHU officers perhaps assisting, Tapp said.
Abdi, whose mental health unravelled over the first half of 2016, spoke to members of the unit about one month before his arrest and death, when he went to the police service’s Elgin Street headquarters and behaved in a confused manner. The unit had also previously reached out to Abdi’s family.
To Tapp’s knowledge, the mental health unit was not contacted on the day of Abdi’s arrest.
The officers involved in Abdi’s arrest have described a fast-moving situation that, in their view, did not offer an opportunity for de-escalation. Only about five minutes elapsed from the time the first officer arrived and tried to handcuff Abdi to the moment Abdi was in custody and went limp after the other officer punched him in the head several times.
Plans for expansion
Plans to expand the mental health unit are underway.
Money is being set aside to train another 18 front-line offers in crisis intervention, which is a voluntary course at OPS. A “dedicated” team pairing an officer and a social worker is also planned, with the goal of having a total of three such teams in the coming years.
“It’s not much, but it’s a start,” Tapp said.
The unit also plans to add more constables to its fold, possibly upping its total complement of officers to seven by the end of 2025.
The unit has secured an anaylst to mine data related to use-of-force incidents involving mental health, Tapp added.
According to OPS’s 2023 use-of-force report, 22 per cent of people injured in use-of-force incidents were involved in “person-in-crisis situations.”
WATCH / The death of Abdirahman Abdi: Here’s what you need to know:
WARNING: This video contains graphic content | Eight years after Abdirahman Abdi died following a violent struggle with Ottawa police, a coroner’s inquest is bringing the event back into the spotlight. Here’s what you need to know.