The Memphis Police Department pioneered CIT in 1988 after the police shooting of a young man who had a mental illness. The Memphis police department, city administration, people with mental illnesses and their families worked together to change law enforcement crisis services to increase safety, understanding and dignity. Twenty-two years later, the CIT model has spread to hundreds of cities and counties around the country and is now being recognized internationally as well.

CIT starts with a 40-hour training, taught by law enforcement officers, about how to handle a mental health crisis safely. The training promotes the use of verbal de-escalation skills before using force when confronting a mental health crisis. CIT training also gives officers the tools they need to understand what someone in a mental health crisis may be experiencing and to direct someone in crisis to appropriate care.

By itself, training cannot compensate for the lack of mental health services in the community. Major Sam Cochran, the founder of CIT, often says that CIT is not just training—and this is why it works so well. CIT builds lasting partnerships between specialized officers, mental health providers, people with mental illnesses and family members in the community.

In all of its trainings, the Minnesota CIT Officer’s Association works with NAMI Minnesota, local mental health providers, people with mental illnesses and their family members. The very act of building these relationships ahead of time gives officers important tools to help them respond safely and effectively when a mental health crisis occurs.

I am very impressed with the CIT course. I encourage my peers to send their personnel to this course and I’ll be so bold as to recommend that this be a required course for all who work in law enforcement.

The course was well-run and taught by instructors that in my opinion have credibility. Often we are taught by those in the health care profession who may at times speak down to law enforcement or who have no knowledge of law enforcement. This course is different in that the instructors are from both sides of the mental health issue and have current law enforcement experience. Above all, officer safety was not compromised.

The instructors made me think and tested my communication skills. The use of professional actors to portray various individuals in crisis provided a realistic feel
to the various crisis scenarios that I had to address in this class. The skills learned in this class are…not only applicable to mental health crisis situations,
but are also applicable…in domestic violence situations, sexual assault investigations, drunk and disorderly situations, death notifications or dealing with an upset citizen.

“For certain individuals who have serious mental illnesses, we could practically use a stopwatch to record how many minutes it takes them to re-offend after they walk out of the jail,” reports one assistant jail administrator in Greater Minnesota. “They cycle in and out of the jail, and the underlying issues, like mental health, never get addressed.”

This scenario has become commonplace. Police officers have become the front line respondents to people with serious mental illnesses who are in crisis. Many Minnesota jails report that well over half of their inmates have mental illnesses. Nationwide, about 64% of jail detainees have mental illnesses.

There is little question as to why this has happened. Mental illnesses affect one in four adults in a given year, and about one in seventeen adults have a serious mental illness. “Due to reasons like stigma and lack of access to the mental health system, the average delay between experiencing symptoms and seeking help is ten years,” says Sue Abderholden, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) of Minnesota.

Meanwhile, many of these individuals will experience signs and symptoms that could easily lead to a 911 call—such as risk taking, impulsive behavior, aggression, paranoia, substance use, grandiosity, hallucinations, delusions, disordered thoughts, extreme mood swings and agitation.

Responding to a mental health crisis raises a long list of problems for law enforcement, who on average receive only zero to six hours of pre-service training in mental illness. Without adequate preparation and training to respond to a mental health crisis, the results can range anywhere from being ineffective
to being fatal. Officer injury, use of force, arrests and sending people to jail due to lack of better alternatives, hours spent in emergency rooms and even trouble with community relations are all problems officers can face when responding to a mental health crisis.