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Why we won't tell you to call 911

Position statement Sources verified 2026-07-19

Every page on this site points you to community-run care and to peers, and never to 911. That is not an oversight and it is not squeamishness. It is a documented judgment about what actually shows up when you call, and we owe you the full reasoning.

The short version

In Regina, the emergency number is police infrastructure, the crisis team is a police program, and the officers are already in the schools. When nearly every door marked "help" opens into the same building, a health project that keeps pointing at those doors is not being neutral. It is laundering a police response as a health response. We refuse to do that, and this page shows our receipts.

What a 911 call actually dispatches

People imagine 911 as a menu: pick ambulance, get ambulance. Start with who answers the phone. Saskatchewan's Provincial Auditor states it flatly: the Regina and Saskatoon 911 answering points "operate within each city's police service." Dialing 911 in this city means a police facility takes the call and decides what gets sent. And in practice, police are routinely dispatched to medical and crisis calls and frequently arrive first, because there are far more patrol cars than ambulances. Saskatchewan's own numbers explain why. Provincial EMS call volume rose 45% between 2019-20 and 2024-25. In urban centres including Regina, only about 64% of ambulance calls met the nine-minute response benchmark in 2024-25, and ambulances have been documented waiting up to 12 hours at Regina emergency rooms to offload patients, off the road the entire time. Saskatchewan Health Authority documents logged 1,132 "no ambulance available" codes across the province in under eight months of 2023, 323 of them in Regina. The pattern reaches the calls the system itself treats as most urgent: in 2022, an officer attending a 911 call about a student at risk at a Regina elementary school requested an ambulance; dispatch recordings showed none was available, and the request was eventually revoked. Police attended a child's medical crisis, and medicine never came. A system this stretched fills the gap with what it has in abundance: armed officers. So the practical result of a 911 call in this city is often police standing over a medical event for the long minutes before medicine arrives.

The "crisis alternative" is a police program

When people raise this, the standard answer is that Regina has a crisis team. It does: PACT, the Police and Crisis Team. Read who runs it. PACT pairs a Saskatchewan Health Authority social worker with a Regina Police Service officer, is operated and promoted by the Regina Police Service, and the police service's own PACT page tells you that if your situation is urgent you should call 911. The crisis team is not an alternative to a police response. It is a police response with a social worker in the passenger seat, and its own escalation path leads straight back to the number we won't print.

The same pattern runs through the school system. The Regina Police Service has operated a School Resource Officer program for more than forty years; as of the school divisions' own review, 15 police positions cover 14 high schools, 81 elementary schools, and 10 alternate programs, with officers holding offices inside the high schools. When the school divisions reviewed the program in 2023, support was weakest among the Indigenous, LGBTQ, and vulnerable students most likely to be on the receiving end of it; the boards voted to keep it anyway. This is the ecosystem: police in the schools, police in the crisis team, police answering the emergency line. None of it is hidden. It is simply never added up in one place, so we are adding it up here.

What the record shows happens

This would matter less if a police-first response were merely inefficient. The record shows it is dangerous, specifically for the people health services exist to help. CBC's Deadly Force database, the first national accounting of deaths in police encounters, counted more than 461 deaths between 2000 and 2017, with over 70% of the people involved dealing with mental health or substance use issues and Black and Indigenous people starkly overrepresented; the updated count to mid-2020 held at 68% and found the death rate still rising. Then one four-month stretch of 2020 put names on the pattern, in the gentlest category of police contact there is: the wellness check and the mental health call. D'Andre Campbell, who called Peel police for help himself, shot in his family's home. Ejaz Ahmed Choudry, 62, shot after police were called to assist paramedics. Chantel Moore, shot during a wellness check; a coroner's jury ruled her death a homicide. Rodney Levi, tasered three times and then shot; ruled a homicide too, by a jury whose recommendations included mobile crisis units instead of RCMP for wellness checks, which is to say: an inquest jury looked at the evidence and recommended what this page is arguing. Regis Korchinski-Paquet, who fell to her death from her 24th-floor balcony while the officers her family had called for help were inside her apartment. Saskatchewan has its own entry: Steven Rigby, shot by Saskatoon police in December 2018 during a mental health crisis.

For overdoses, the chilling effect is measured, not speculative. The federal Good Samaritan Drug Overdose Act protects a caller from simple possession charges only; it does not protect anyone with an outstanding warrant, and it never protects against production or trafficking charges. The numbers on what follows are measured, not speculative: Canadian data found naloxone-trained bystanders did not call emergency services for 30% to 65% of the overdoses they attended, over a third citing fear of police, and studies consistently put the share of overdose witnesses deterred by police involvement at 52% to 75%. In Regina this is concrete, because overdose calls literally go to the police: the Regina Police Service responded to 54 suspected overdoses in a single week of June 2025, and when people tried routing around 911 by using the police non-emergency line in 2026, it was the police communications centre that told them to stop. Harm reduction researchers have argued for ending routine police attendance at overdoses for precisely this reason. A "call 911" instruction on an overdose is, for a real subset of the people most likely to witness one, an instruction they cannot safely follow.

This is not a fringe position

In June 2020, CAMH, Canada's largest mental health hospital, said it plainly: police should not be the first responders to people in mental health crisis, because a crisis is a health event and police are not trained for crisis care. CMHA National said the same thing two months later, in exactly these words: a mental health crisis "must be a health-care response, not a law-enforcement response." That is the mainstream clinical position, stated by the country's flagship institutions. What is missing is not evidence or expert consensus. What is missing is the political will to build a response that matches the consensus, and in the meantime the police-first default rolls on, funded and expanding, while ambulances queue at the ER.

What we do instead, honestly

We point you only at doors the community runs itself: CMHA Regina's peer-led programs (1810 Albert Street, 306-525-9543), run on lived experience, weekdays, with no police involvement, and the community clinics, co-ops, and harm reduction organizations on our resource map, every one of them chosen because you can walk in or phone the people who actually run it. This site's referrals are community-run or they are nothing: we do not route people into the provincial health bureaucracy's own intake lines either, because a referral is an endorsement and we only endorse what communities control. We would also like to print a peer-run evening warm line here. Saskatchewan does not have one. We say that plainly instead of dressing some other service up as one, because the absence is part of the same story this page tells: the province funds crisis teams inside police services while the community-run, police-free alternative simply does not exist after office hours. Where a police-partnered service appears on our resource map, because it exists and you deserve to know what it is, the listing says so in plain words, so nobody calls it thinking they are getting something else.

And we are honest about the gap this leaves: Regina has no non-police emergency response to send you to, and we will not pretend otherwise by printing a number that dispatches the very thing people are trying to avoid. If a life is in danger right now, no website is the answer, this one included; close this page and get help from the people around you. Naming the gap, in public, with sources, is the point of this page. A city that can fund fifteen officers for its schools can fund an unarmed crisis response for its streets. Until it does, this site will keep saying so.