One in five adults in the U.S. live with a mental illness, yet the amount of mental health crisis services being offered is still severely lacking—so much so, in fact, that it has left law enforcement officers with no choice but to serve as first-responders to the majority of mental health crises. Many times, unnecessary physical force is used during those interactions, resulting in serious injury and death. CIT was developed as a response.
The Crisis Intervention Team (“CIT”) program, also known as the Memphis Model, is a first-responder model of crisis intervention training and is considered a “Best Practice” model in law enforcement. CIT was developed for the welfare of individuals with mental illness and/or addictions, allowing them to access medical treatment rather than be processed through the criminal justice system. CIT seeks to reduce the risk of injury or death during police interactions involving persons with mental illness with a community-based approach, connecting law enforcement, mental health providers, hospital emergency services, and persons with mental illnesses and their families.
The CIT program is a 40-hour training course that centers around five themes:
This program includes basic information about mental illness, information about the local mental health system and policies, interaction with consumers and family members, verbal de-escalation training, and role-playing. It teaches officers how to de-escalate and where to navigate people in a crisis – emphasizing jail diversion and teaching officers the benefits of treatment instead of incarceration. After completing the program, CIT officers are dispatched to mental health calls or to assist officers who are not CIT qualified.
CIT is not just a training program. CIT’s goals also include building partnerships, identifying problems and creating solutions, identifying what crisis resources are available, and ensuring that those crisis resources are easily accessible to those in need.
CIT’s benefits include:
CIT’s benefits are numerous, but are they enough? Should CIT be the standard across police stations and communities nationwide?
It’s important to note that:
CIT is also known as a Police-Mental Health Collaboration (“PMHC”) program. PMHC programs strive to train officers to identify signs and symptoms of mental illness, utilize stabilization and de-escalation techniques, and increase access to mental health resources.
Besides CIT, there are four other approaches, which are:
To determine whether CIT is enough, agencies need to assess their community’s needs and existing resources. Comparing their community’s needs and resources should determine which type(s) of PMHC program(s) is appropriate.