Mental Health And Police Violence: How Crisis Intervention Teams Are Failing

Daniel Prude's death in police custody illustrates a common flaw in how police respond to mental health crises, but reform advocates disagree on whether to improve police training or bypass police almost entirely. Mental health crises make up a large share of police calls, jailings, and fatal police shootings. Most police training on mental health responses is limited to 4-12 hours. Some departments put at least some officers through crisis intervention training. But critics of police-focused responses prefer non-police response teams, in use in a few cities.

Tuscon police use a combination of training and expanded resources to resolve mental health crises by putting people in the hands of mental health professionals, an approach that in 2019 diverted nearly 4,400 cases away from arrests and jail. All police officers take a required 12-hour mental health first aid class, and most go through another 40-hour crisis intervention training. A specialized team gets more extensive training to handle court-ordered interventions, emphasizing patience and humane treatment. A 24/7 Crisis Response Center serves as an intake desk to decide what help people in crisis need.

Although several Colorado law enforcement agencies have trained officers on how to de-escalate interactions with people in a crisis, including people with disabilities, the state in 2022 will become the latest to mandate such training for all law enforcement officers. The training is backed by a study that suggests it helps police better recognize and understand the reactions that people with disabilities might have under stress in a confrontation with police. Trained officers in Boulder last year successfully ended one potentially violent incident without serious inury.

Crisis intervention training for Kansas City police officers does not reach the majority of the department and can fail to address a critical reason that police might use excessive force on people with disabilities. Although the 40-hour training includes a segment on dealing with people with autism and developmental disabilities, the combination of racial bias and some people's eccentric behavior can cause officers' "compliance culture" to kick in and make them overreact to perceived threats. Training without culture change, advocates say, is doomed to have short-lived effects.

The Violence Against Women Act was billed as a way to make a patriarchal society, and policing profession in particular, take domestic violence more seriously. It encouraged policies making arrest of alleged abusers mandatory, even to the point of punishing victims who refused to cooperate in prosecutions. This has backfired on many victims, especially women of color who distrust police and their punitive approaches to solving family problems. The law also prioritizes punitive approaches in its awarding of federal grants, thus denying victim aid to women who do not wish to cooperate with arrests.

In the wake of George Floyd's killing by police in Minneapolis, where several officers failed to prevent one officer's actions, New Orleans police have been besieged by requests from police nationwide to export their method of training officers to intervene to prevent misconduct by fellow officers. New Orleans' reputation for police brutality and corruption has improved, in part because of its "active bystander" training. Complaints are down and public support is up. Now its internal EPIC training course is available free to other departments as ABLE: Active Bystandership for Law Enforcement.

The LEAD program (Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion), which was launched in Seattle in 2011 and is used in such cities as Atlanta, Los Angeles, Portland, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, provides intensive case management and services to people who come in contact with police and qualify to have their low-level cases bypass the criminal justice system. LEAD has been shown to lower recidivism by half and to make it more likely that people with drug and mental health, and other problems can find housing and jobs more easily. But this critical analysis argues that the police should not serve as gatekeepers.

In the past decade, Seattle has reduced their use of force by 60 percent. Spurred by a court order, the reduction comes from greater de-escalation training, stricter, more nuanced policies, and more collaboration between law enforcement and activists. While moving the needle, many cite the long way the city has to go, especially when it comes to how force is still used disproportionately on communities of color. But because they’ve made progress without endangering officers, other states like California look to Seattle as a model of reform.

Under new leadership, Indianapolis has seen a drastic decline in fatal police shootings. While the new police chief, Bryan Roach, shares credit with his entire force, many credit his new policies for the decline. Initiatives like addressing behavioral health, implicit bias training, and mental health crisis training are just some of the changes being made. While much progress has been made, there is still a ways to go when it comes to rebuilding trust within the community.

Waukesha County law enforcement departments are receiving Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) training through the National Alliance on Mental Illness to teach them how to recognize and respond to people experiencing mental health crises by safely de-escalating the situations and connecting the people to resources and care, rather than jail and hospital stays. As of 2023, hundreds of officers in at least 19 counties have been CIT trained.