Bartholomew County Sheriff’s Department and Columbus Police Department are hoping to expand the number of officers who receive specialized training to handle mental health and other crisis situations.
The training program, called Crisis Intervention Team training, or CIT, seeks to boost collaboration between law enforcement and mental health resources in the community, according to CIT International.
CIT is a 40-hour program that teaches officers skills and strategies to de-escalate unstable situations that require a different approach than criminal offenses — including substance abuse crises, depression, suicide, traumatic brain injuries, among other mental illnesses.
So far, five officers at the two agencies have undergone the training and an additional 18 — nine from each agency — are expected to get trained at a session that will be held in Columbus in November, said Bartholomew County Sheriff Chief Deputy Maj. Chris Lane.
The goals of the effort to train more officers is to decrease the number of people suffering from mental illness who wind up in the criminal justice system due to illness-related behaviors and increase referrals to local organizations, including Columbus Regional Health, Centerstone and the Alliance for Substance Abuse Progress, local law enforcement officials said.
The training, experts say, could be the difference between an incident ending in treatment or incarceration, injuries or worse.
“The end goal would be to have someone (with the training on duty) 24/7,” said Bartholomew County Sheriff’s Deputy Andy Whipker, who recently underwent CIT training for the second time. “But our goal right now is that the people that we have selected to attend our training that we’re going to have are spread out over different shifts and units at the police department and the sheriff’s office so there is a high likeliness that at least one of us will hopefully be working at any time.”
Some of the key parts of the training include active listening skills, building trust with the individual experiencing a mental health crisis and not escalating the situation as long as everyone is safe and “time is on our side,” said CPD officer Alyson Eichel, who recently underwent CIT training.
However, just the presence of someone whom the individual does not know, such as law enforcement, can escalate the situation, Eichel said.
“The emphasis is a safe result, not necessarily a quick result,” Eichel said. “…With someone who is experiencing a mental illness — they might be paranoid or manic — we recognize that an officer could unintentionally make a situation worse. So when time is on our side, just slowing things down, building trust with an individual, that’s valued over a quick resolution.”
The effort to train more officers to respond to mental health crises comes as the number of instances in which law enforcement detained and transported people to Columbus Regional Hospital for evaluation increased last year, mirroring trends seen across the country.
Nationwide, the mentally ill are 16 times more likely to be killed by police, and people with certain ailments like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are 10 times more likely to be incarcerated rather than receive medical treatment, according to the Treatment Advocacy Center, a nonprofit that seeks to expand treatment for the mentally ill.
About one in four people fatally shot by police in Indiana since 2015 were exhibiting signs of mental illness, mirroring similar figures nationwide, according to a database of police shootings by The Washington Post.
Last year, law enforcement officers in the Columbus area transported people to CRH for evaluation 382 times — or, on average, more than once per day, Whipker said.
Last year, the number of these emergency detentions by the Bartholomew County Sheriff’s Office increased 78%. At CPD, they went up 26%.
And the situation is not getting any better, said Bartholomew County Sheriff Matt Myers.
On Tuesday, Bartholomew County Sheriff’s deputies were dispatched to a parking lot near the Red Roof Inn and Kentucky Fried Chicken in Taylorsville after a witness reported that a man was jumping around a car, possibly brandishing some sort of handgun.
At one point, the witness said the individual, believed to be high on methamphetamine, took what was appeared to be a gun behind the restaurant, dropped it, and then picked it back up and went back to the car.
Whipker and Lane, who have both been trained in crisis intervention, were among those on the scene, Myers said.
The man told the deputies that he had just finished a 28-day stint in rehab but relapsed and used methamphetamine and had not slept in four days, Myers said.
Lane talked with the individual about his options, and the man agreed to be taken to Columbus Regional Hospital.
Later, officers determined the gun that the individual was brandishing was actually a pellet or paint gun, not a weapon that would shoot bullets.
The individual was not arrested, and Myers said Lane had walked the individual through the next steps needed for him to get help after the deputies arrived at the scene.
“We are lucky we didn’t have to use force in this situation,” Myers said. “I don’t want a deputy to ever have to shoot anyone and have to deal with that for the rest of their lives. I don’t want anyone strung out on meth to be shot because they are out of control. This guy had been awake four to five nights and with just one bad decision. There could have been repercussions on multiple lives forever. This is what we’re dealing with. People are putting so much on law enforcement right now.”
“We want the community to understand what we are seeing,” Myers added. “It’s not getting any better, and we need a place for individuals to find long-term residential treatment.”
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National Alliance for Mental Illness has a website about crisis intervention training at nami.org/Advocacy/Crisis-Intervention/Crisis-Intervention-Team-(CIT)-Programs.
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