The town hall comes the week after city council voted down a motion to carve 10 per cent from the police budget and dedicate it toward social programs
“I truly don’t understand why we’re holding this virtual town-hall meeting when you’ve all just increased the police budget by $15 million, while we’ve been chanting to defund the police,” said one speaker, Jazzmin, who did not provide her last name. “Will this meeting actually change anything? Are you finally listening?”
The project is called the Reach Out Response Network. It is modelled partly on CAHOOTS, a 30-year-old program in Eugene, Ore., that dispatches medics and mental-health workers to people in crisis instead of armed police. Currently, Toronto Police respond to 30,000 mental health calls a year – nearly a third of which are suicide calls.
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