Getting Crisis Intervention Right

March 14, 2008

In Wenatchee, Washington, they take their Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) work seriously. For five years, police, corrections, and probations officers have enjoyed the opportunity to attend an annual training program in CIT. The training provides 40 hours of education and role-playing designed to foster better understanding of the needs of people in crisis due to mental health issues.

"Effective first response drives down long-term costs of crisis intervention," says Sgt. Cherie Smith, responsible with Sgt. Ken Manke for first bringing the training program to Wenatchee. "It improves overall skills in dealing with the public. And our community has seen the results of that already and appreciates it."

For law-enforcement professionals and the community alike, CIT training has been no empty bureaucratic exercise. The benefits for both have been real and significant.

What Makes CIT Work?

Most law-enforcement professionals – including first responders, corrections, and probation officers – know all too well that encounters with the mentally ill can become chronic when appropriate referrals do not result.

At the same time, recent studies have shown that the impact of incarceration in jail, or even worse, prison, can cause a great deal of harm to a mentally ill person struggling to recover. Even a brief stay in jail can lead to job loss, which can then lead quickly to homelessness. That, in turn, may produce more encounters with law enforcement.

This precarious element in the lives of mentally ill persons working to recover is why resilience is emphasized so strongly as an element of recovery. Training law-enforcement professionals to deal appropriately with the mentally ill helps them stay on the path of recovery – and out of the hair of law enforcement.

For all these reasons, and many others, the Mental Health Transformation Project has made CIT one of its key priorities. We have been collaborating with the Criminal Justice Training Commission and contributing funds to support an effort to make CIT training available in all parts of Washington State.

Not Just Do-Gooding

In the end, it's not just a boy-scout impulse that makes people in Wenatchee and elsewhere put such a high priority on CIT. There's no question that it's the humane and right thing to do, but some of the other benefits include:

More physical safety of first responders (police officers, deputies, sheriffs)
More physical safety of the community
More public trust for law-enforcement professionals
Less recidivism among the mentally ill
Fewer suicides

Ultimately, all of this translates to lower costs associated with law enforcement, hospital emergency rooms, and other crisis intervention expenditures.

Improvements to the System

"It's hard to say what would have happened if we had never done this," says Jim Colvin, Chelan-Douglas Regional Support Network (RSN) Administrator."We have definitely seen better interactions between all the agencies involved and with the public as well."

Colvin says the CIT trainings are the fruit, in part, of a Mental Health Stakeholders Group, formed in the late '90s with representation from both citizens and public officials. The group meets monthly and takes a broadly collaborative approach to solving problems related to mental health issues that touch many different groups in the community.

Next, they hope to find a way to create a triage center in the region, a place where the mentally ill in crisis can be taken instead of jail – a place where they can be monitored and evaluated with minimal risk of long-term harm to their prospects for recovery.

A Brightening Outlook in Wenatchee

Realistic handling of the mentally ill appears to be getting better all the time in Wenatchee. Colvin and Smith report that better than 50% of the Wenatchee Police Department is now CIT-trained, along with nearly the same levels of jail personnel and regional sheriff's staff.

Perhaps most encouraging of all, they point to the fact that people in emergency situations are specifically beginning to request CIT-trained personnel on the scene. That's the kind of momentum that takes no small amount of time and effort to build.

This year, the Chelan-Douglas CIT Planning Committee took the commitment another step further with a set of awards honoring and recognizing individuals for their CIT efforts, either in a specific incident or more generally for their ability to apply CIT skills in day-to-day work.

The winners, announced earlier this month, were:

Probation Officer of the Year: Corrina Willms
Corrections Officer of the Year: Corporal Jeff Hughes
First Responder Officer of the Year: Officer Brian Chance

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