Alberta’s RCMP Real Time Operations Centre is working to add a mental health clinician to support officers handling mental-health crises across the province.
Inspector Chris Smiley, who heads RTOC, said the clinician would help officers assess and manage these calls remotely.
While valuable, those teams cannot cover every detachment 24/7.
“Our teams in the field where we pair a clinician and a member up, those are great, but we do not have enough teams to run 24 hours, seven days a week for every detachment,” he said.
A clinician at RTOC would provide expertise when local teams are unavailable and could divert some calls by speaking with people by phone or connecting them to community resources—avoiding the need for an officer response.
“It is a health emergency, so the police ideally shouldn’t be our first stop for those things,” Smiley said.
Nationally, the RCMP responds to over 120,000 mental health-related occurrences and well-being checks annually, which generally account for about 4% to 5% of all calls for service.
Individual detachment reports in Alberta show varying numbers based on region. For example, smaller urban or rural detachments like St. Albert or Cochrane report handling hundreds of specific Mental Health Act calls or crisis files per year, with many areas noting an upward trend over recent years
Alberta RCMP hopes to launch the service later this year.
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