Benjamin’s death occurred after some Montreal police officers had already received training designed to teach them how to de-escalate situations involving someone experiencing mental distress.

A mental health training program was one of several recommendations made by a Quebec coroner following an inquest into the death of Alain Magloire, a homeless man who was shot and killed by a Montreal police officer. Magloire was displaying symptoms of mental illness at the time. He was one of four Montrealers killed by police under similar circumstances in 2014.

By all accounts, the training program that some Montreal officers undergo is a solid one. It was designed by mental health experts and modelled on programs that have been set up in other Canadian cities such as Toronto.

Toronto police received new mental health training after an inquest into the highly publicized shooting death of teenager Sammy Yatim on a subway in 2013. But just last March, police in Toronto killed 30-year-old Devon LaFleur, who had bipolar disorder. Critics and LaFleur’s family say his death could have been avoided.

In Canada, people who live with mental health issues still make up 40 per cent of all civilian deaths at the hands of police officers.

A lot of Canadian police officers have now been trained in nonviolent techniques that are used on a regular basis by nurses on psychiatric wards. And yet, these tragedies keep occurring. So what’s the problem?

In the four most recent cases that resulted in the deaths of people with mental health issues at the hands of Montreal police officers, we’ve heard that police officers overreacted to a situation.

Interviews with mental health experts after shooting incidents have produced advice on how police could handle these situations differently. One frequently repeated suggestion is that officers use a calm tone of voice when talking to an individual who is experiencing distress.

That sounds like commonsense advice. But anyone who’s ever been involved in a tense situation knows it’s extremely difficult to use a calm tone of voice when you’re scared.

Police officers are reacting to people with mental illness in the same way the rest of us tend to. Most of us, out of fear, avoid interacting with someone who is behaving in an unconventional way.

Our fear is the result of deeply rooted prejudices and misconceptions about mental illness. We believe that people experiencing symptoms of mental illness can’t be reasoned with. We think they’ll behave in an erratic, unpredictable fashion, and we believe they are more prone to violence than the rest of us.

Experts have repeatedly told us this isn’t true. But that doesn’t stop us from believing it.

Changing attitudes takes a lot of hard work and a lot of time. Given what we’ve learned from the civil rights and other advocacy movements, where it has taken decades to make progress, it doesn’t seem realistic to assume that a few training sessions could rid anyone of a lifetime’s worth of built-up prejudices.

Police officers will continue to react out of fear, as long as society allows prejudices and misconceptions about mental illness to endure.

People with severe mental illness aren’t only dying at the hands of police. They are also suffering in plain sight on our street corners.

When we stand by and allow people who have serious health problems to sleep in bus shelters and beg for change on sidewalks, we treat them like second-class citizens whose lives aren’t worth very much. It’s not really fair to hold police officers to higher standards than we hold ourselves to. If we want police officers to change their attitudes, we should start by changing ours.