Almost a week after 29-year-old Regis Korchinski-Paquet fell to her death at a west-end apartment building, the co-chair of the Toronto Police Services Board’s anti-racism advisory panel says she has been looking for patterns and has found a major one in desperate need of changing.
“Police are not equipped to address mental health issues in the community effectively, and I don’t think we should continue going down the same road in terms of the ways in which they respond,” Dr. Notisha Massaquoi told Global News in an interview.
“I cannot believe that the response that Regis’s family got was a protocolled response and that protocol was followed, and if that was the protocol then we have some serious questioning to do in terms of what should we expect those kinds of situations.”
It is that exact response protocol that is currently the subject of a probe by Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit (SIU), the province’s independent police watchdog — a probe that multiple stakeholders are calling for to be quick, fulsome and transparent.
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Korchinski-Paquet’s mother,
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