Saturday will mark 10 years since a Black man in crisis died after a violent arrest by Ottawa police, and advocates say that while some positive steps have been taken in the last decade to help people in mental health distress, the changes so far need to be followed by more.
“There’s still a lot more we need to do systemically to be able to say we have really achieved a lot after the death of Mr. Abdirahman Abdi,” said Sahada Alolo of the Ottawa Guiding Council for Mental Health and Addictions, which formed in 2021 to help craft a new, more culturally-appropriate and trauma-informed crisis response system in the capital.
Abdi was a 38-year-old Somali Canadian whose mental health unraveled in the six months leading to his arrest.
He was pronounced dead on July 25, 2016, the day after he was punched in the head during a struggle with police in front of his Hintonburg apartment building.
Abdi’s death sparked outrage in Ottawa and beyond, and led to questions about the Ottawa Police Service (OPS)’s use of force and its handling of calls involving Black people and mental health.
One of the arresting officers was found not guilty of manslaughter in 2020, while Abdi’s family and police settled a lawsuit later that year.
A coroner’s inquest in 2024 declared Abdi’s death a homicide and considered what participants said were missed opportunities — among not only the arresting officers but also bystanders and the medical community — to de-escalate and even prevent the situation that quickly spiraled on July 24, 2016.
“I think it became a turning point for the recognition and acknowledgement of systemic racism,” Alolo said of that fateful morning. “Indigenous communities, Black communities, Middle Eastern communities, non-white communities in Ottawa: we’ve been experiencing racism and talking about it for years.
“But I think … the killing of Mr. Abdirahman brought to the forefront that institutions needed to step up.”
Twenty-eight of the 57 inquest recommendations were directed at OPS.
The central one called on the police force to create a mental health advisory council reflective of the lived experiences of people struggling with mental illness to help the police service develop “a coordinated and cohesive OPS-wide mental health strategy specific to improving outcomes where police interact with those in crisis.”
That council is now in place. In addition, since early 2025 a Mental Health Change Initiative at the police force has implemented “a range of measures” to improve practices, policies and training, according to OPS’s formal response to the recommendations.
Last fall, OPS launched a team composed of one officer and one medical health professional to respond to mental health calls, and planning is underway for a second team.
While OPS officers have been trained in de-escalation techniques for years, the inquest heard the police force was developing “a specialized mental health and de-escalation training program” to help officers “better manage crisis situations” and reduce the need for force.
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Other changes, such as the ability for officers and call takers to tap into information about past mental health calls, were put in place between 2016 and 2024, the inquest also heard.
But advocates like Alolo of the guiding council stress that police intervention is not, by itself, the right approach for people wrestling with mental illness.
That’s why wider change remains necessary, they say, including more culturally appropriate mental health care before things reach the crisis stage — and the funding to back it.
“Put money behind what we are talking about,” Alolo said. “It is very easy for us to put on paper that we are coming out with policies and programs to bring change, but it means nothing if the people on ground don’t really feel the impact.”
In the wake of Abdi’s death, a group called the Justice for Abdirahman Coalition formed.
It, too, advocated for moving away from police responses to mental health calls, and has continued to give out a bursary in Abdi’s memory every year.
Ifrah Yusuf, the chair of the coalition, said the launch of the Alternative Neighbourhood Crisis Response (ANCHOR) program in 2024 — an outgrowth of the work of the Ottawa Guiding Council for Mental Health and Addictions — is a positive development.
In its first year, the city-funded ANCHOR program dispatched crisis response workers to 1,874 calls, over 90 per cent of which were handled with no police involvement.
ANCHOR crisis response team expanding to cover more neighbourhoods
This year ANCHOR expanded to even more neighbourhoods, including Hintonburg, where Abdi and his family lived.
But for cases where police involvement is deemed necessary, the focus needs to be on de-escalation, Yusuf said.
“We want to make sure that no other family experiences what Abdirahman’s family experienced,” Yusuf said.
A study of OPS’s de-escalation tactics is now underway by Carleton University’s Police Research Lab, according to a March OPS update to the Ottawa Police Service Board.
WATCH | The questions leading up to the 2024 Abdirahman Abdi coroner’s inquest:
The death of Abdirahman Abdi — and the questions that remain
The OPS declined to be interviewed for this story. It directed CBC News to reports addressing its ongoing response to the Abdi inquest recommendations, including the March update to the board.
During the 2024 inquest, the officers involved in Abdi’s arrest described a fast-moving scene 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 when Abdi, who had fled toward his apartment, was in custody and went limp after the other officer punched him in the head.
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The officers were responding to calls that Abdi had assaulted several people, including women he groped in or near a Hintonburg coffee shop. The first officer said the call details indicated mental health was a factor but that he approached the incident as “a criminal call.”
Deputy Chief Steve Bell was asked during the inquest how the force’s response to a situation like Abdi’s would be different now.
Bell said officers had since received “considerably more exposure” to training on bias-free policing, “a much higher level and degree of de-escalation training,” and more access to information about past mental health calls.
Still, Bell said, “we have much more work to do.”
During closing submissions, a lawyer for OPS said the police service would be launching two mobile crisis response teams consisting of one officer from the force’s mental health unit and one mental health professional. One of those two teams started operating last October.
The lawyer for OPS at the inquest added that 20 frontline patrol officers would be trained in crisis intervention techniques, the goal being to have each platoon staffed with one officer equipped with specialized mental health response training.
Black, Middle Eastern people again overrepresented in police use-of-force stats
Lawrence Greenspon, the lawyer representing Abdi’s family during the inquest, said he didn’t believe OPS had made enough changes, pointing to OPS’s latest use-of-force figures, which show that Black people in Ottawa, who make up about eight per cent of the city’s population, continue to be disproportionately on the receiving end of force from officers.
“Dealing with the racial basis of the inquest, the police’s own statistics demonstrate that that is still a very serious problem,” Greenspon said.
A community panel that has been reviewing use-of-force cases for systemic issues for the purpose of recommending improvements is expected to unveil its first findings this fall, according to OPS’s March update.
One of the other groups to form in the years after Abdi’s death was the Ottawa Black Mental Health Coalition.
Started in 2021, the coalition of about 30 organizations works across the city to link Black Ottawans with mental health counselling and other services.
Preventative and wrap-around supports are key, according to Michelle James, the coordinator for the coalition. “I think the ultimate goal is not more crisis response. The ultimate goal is less crisis,” she said.
One of the coalition’s members, the African, Caribbean and Black Wellness Resource Centre, which was also founded in 2021, provides food bank services as well as programming for seniors and youth.
The Somali Centre for Family Services, around since 1991, offers culturally adapted programs that work with both parents and youth to normalize conversations around mental health and well-being, James added.
Still, “there’s still so much work to be done because, of course, we’re talking about decades and generations of challenges [and barriers],” James said. “Those problems are not going to be solved overnight, but I know that the more we come together, the stronger we will be in addressing those challenges.”
After Abdi’s death, Alolo of the Ottawa Guiding Council for Mental Health and Addictions interviewed members of the city’s Somali community.
They expressed a desire for a “cultural mental health support centre” where, as Alolo put it, “they have trust and they have confidence to talk to people from their community that can listen to their issues.”
“It’s going to take several institutions to come on board in a coordinated way to help us get the funding,” Alolo said. “We are currently working on that and it is a priority of the Ottawa Guiding Council to make sure that this happens.”
