Ottawa police get almost $1M to prevent violent extremism
The federal government is providing nearly $1 million to expand an Ottawa police program in an effort to prevent violent extremism.
The funding announced Friday will go to the Ottawa Multiagency Early Risk Intervention Tables (MERIT) program, which is led by police and includes health and social service organizations along with school boards.
Police and their partners meet regularly to evaluate the cases of at-risk individuals and coordinate how to best respond, said Ottawa Police Service Staff Sgt. Anthony Skinner.
"We're not focusing on people who have moved already forward into the criminal space," he said. "We're focusing on those people who are, as a result of many risk factors, quite often working themselves toward this path."
Skinner said preventing radicalization toward violent extremism would be "uncharted territory" for some partners, but national security organizations will also be involved in the new mandate.
He said individuals' privacy will remain protected, with personal information only disclosed to organizations directly involved in delivering specialized help to the person at risk.
Solving pathways to extremism
Skinner said the work of diverting at-risk people facing homelessness, addiction or other mental health issues away from extremism may have applications when it comes to security.
"Violent extremism might be only one of their risk factors, among many. And by treating some of those ... we may also be inevitably solving the pathways toward that extremism," he said.
Police will be looking at radicalization on a variety of forms — whether it's based on racial or religious ideology or something like misogynistic ideology, which may have motivated this summer's van attack in Toronto.
"Various types of violent extremism pop up all around the world, even here within Canada," Skinner said.
The program, he added, has hired a new coordinator and will be looking at the logistics of how best to expand from a pilot program, based in the eastern part of the city, to one with a wider reach.
The government said the funding will be distributed over four years and comes from Public Safety Canada's community resilience fund.
