By Pat Reavy
The Deseret Morning News
SALT LAKE CITY — The scene was complete chaos.
Police officers responded to a complaint that a neighbor’s son had killed the complainant’s dog. When police entered the home, they found a mother in a wheelchair who also suffered from a mild mental illness, her son with a moderate mental illness, a daughter with sevedepression who had been sniffing glue and another daughter diagnosed as being both histrionic and hypersexual.
Within minutes after police arrived, yelling ensued from all parts of the house as the siblings argued and taunted each other, and yelled at police and at the neighbor who wouldn’t listen to police orders to stay away from the house. All the while, a TV was blasting music videos and the phone wouldn’t stop ringing. There was so much noise in the house that the challenge for anyone to think straight, especially officers, seemed daunting.
Even more challenging for officers was to calm everyone down, keep certain people separated and still determine whether a crime had been committed.
In this case, however, the room was filled with silent observers. The officers responding were in training, and the people creating the ruckus were actors. But the scenario was based on a real-life police call.
Last week, the Salt Lake Police Department conducted one of its Crisis Intervention Team training sessions. Between 25 and 35 law enforcers from jurisdictions across Utah attended the weeklong course to learn correct ways for dealing with people suffering from a mental illness.
On Friday, the officers were put through several training scenarios ranging from the odd to the dangerous. All of the scenarios were situations that actually happened, with all but one of the events originally taking place in Salt Lake City.
In one scenario, a man who just found out he was HIV positive went on a cocaine and alcohol binge and later held a machete to his throat.
“I just want to die,” the actor told police.
The task for officers was to try to get the man to drop the knife and take him into custody to get professional help, without getting injured themselves. Sometimes a subject’s behavior may be strange, but an officer has to decide whether it is criminal. Should the person the officer is dealing with be taken to jail, left alone, or should the officer make an effort to get that person professional help?
In another scenario, Salt Lake police officer Jared Gilbert brilliantly portrayed a man who believed his neighbor in the apartment above him was using an infrared camera to take pictures of him naked and post them on the Internet.
At the end of each scenario, members of the Salt Lake Police Department and Valley Mental Health discuss with the trainees what they did right and what they needed to improve for next time.
“Don’t confirm or deny what’s going on. Don’t make promises,” Gilbert tells the group. “Don’t do things you can’t back up to get out of the situation.”
In Gilbert’s scenario, his character wanted police to make an arrest immediately. Several times his character asked the officers, “Don’t you believe me?”
Gilbert instructed the trainees not to commit to an answer and not to promise to go arrest the neighbor just so the mentally ill person would leave them alone. Another instruction he gave was for officers to avoid questioning that might make the subject more agitated.
CIT training in Utah began in 2001. The course is designed to not only train officers on how to detect a person with a mental illness, but also determine what illness the person may have and the proper way to interact with that person.
Maybe the most important lesson officers are taught is how to have empathy for the person with the illness.
Bob Gorelik, the crisis coordinator for Valley Mental Health who also assisted officers with their training, said there had been a dramatic difference in the way mentally ill people were treated by law enforcement since the CIT program in Utah was started.
“I don’t think I could perform my job duties today as successfully without CIT officers,” he said. “It’s a partnership. They’re there to assist us, and we assist them.”
Before CIT training, Gorelik said law enforcement didn’t know what to do when they came in contact with a person with a mental illness, so they always did the same thing.
“They’d be incarcerated,” he said.
Today, the officers treat mentally ill people with compassion.
“They’re treated as human beings,” Gorelik said. “People with a mental illness are not automatically taken to jail and incarcerated. CIT officers now respond compassionately and give them the help they need.”
That’s also a benefit to taxpayers, or “consumers,” who don’t have to pay for additional people being locked in jail.
“It’s a win-win for everyone,” he said.
CIT program director Frank Bruno said on average, one out of every four people each year are diagnosed with a mental illness. Because of that, he said police officers are almost guaranteed to come in contact with a person who has a mental illness.
If a mental illness is causing a person to commit a crime, then police need to be able to identify it in order to stop it.
During the role-playing scenarios Friday, officers learned the questions they ask a mentally ill person, the demeanor they take with that person, the number of officers they call for backup or how they protect themselves were all important factors in dealing with mentally ill subjects.
“I think it’s great,” said Primary Children’s Medical Center security Sgt. Chris Reese of the role playing scenarios.
Reese said he hoped the classes would help him so if he was ever faced with a similar situation that his training would automatically kick in.
Copyright 2008 The Deseret News Publishing Co.