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20 cops finish crisis training
YOUNGSTOWN
Twenty officers from Mahoning County police departments graduated from a weeklong crisis intervention team training program at Youngstown State University as the program marked its 10th anniversary here.
The training is designed to de-escalate crisis interactions between police and mentally disabled people to enhance the safety and well-being of everyone affected by such confrontations.
“Ten percent of the calls that an average police officer on patrol goes on involve someone in a mental health crisis,” said Michael Woody, a retired Akron police lieutenant and CIT International president, who brought the program to Ohio in 2000.
“Those can be very challenging calls and can be dangerous sometimes,” added Woody, who attended the Friday graduation luncheon.
“They need a course like this to learn about mental illness, to basically build up some empathy for those with the illness, and then to give them a skill set to de-escalate those that are in crisis,” he said.
A total of 269 officers from most of Mahoning County’s 23 police departments have undergone the training over the past decade, said Michele Petrello, community education and probate court liaison at the Mahoning County Mental Health and Recovery Board.
“It’s meant to help them understand mental-health clients and people who have addiction problems. It’s for the safety of both the client and the officer,” she said of the training.
“In the jail, we deal with a lot of people with mental illness and a lot of drug use, and every situation has to be handled differently,” said Deputy Michael Taylor of the Mahoning County Sheriff’s Office, who graduated from the CIT program. “Sometimes, you don’t have a lot of time, but you have to analyze the situation as it progresses and handle it appropriately.”
The training has given the graduates the tools to better handle crises, Taylor said.
“A lot of times, that is your best defense – to talk them down,” said Taylor, who works in the county jail, where deputies carry no guns or Tasers.
Often, a useful approach is for the deputy to tell the inmate: “Let’s talk about this and see what we can do to resolve the situation here,” Taylor said.
Sgt. Chuck Hillman of the Boardman police graduated from the course that ended Friday and has been a school resource officer for about 15 years.
“Officers are dealing more and more with individuals in our community that have not only mental health issues, but, in some instances, a combination of mental health and substance abuse problems,” Hillman said. “Unfortunately, I see juveniles, teenagers, that are struggling with some of the same things, so, this training will help me in my job in dealing with teenagers that are experiencing some of the same problems.”
Thirty-six percent of full-time police officers in Mahoning County have taken the course, Woody said.
More than 9,000 full-time police officers in Ohio have completed the course, he noted. “That encompasses 65 percent of our just about 1,000 police agencies” in Ohio, he added.
“It’s saving officers’ lives. It’s saving [the lives of] those persons with mental illness,” preventing injuries and saving families of mentally disabled people from grief, he said of the program.
The mental health board pays for the training, which is offered here twice a year, using the board’s local real-estate-tax levy funds. The training includes presentations by a psychiatrist, a psychologist, a nurse, social workers, mental-health counselors, and experts in developmental disabilities, child and adolescent behavior, cultural diversity, drug addiction and dementia.
Trainees ride along with mental-health agency case managers to visit group homes, the agencies and other places where people with mental disabilities are likely to be found.
Duane Piccirilli, the mental health board’s executive director, said he’d like to offer future crisis intervention training to 911 emergency dispatchers, who often speak to emotionally upset callers in crises.
In Trumbull County, 180 police and corrections officers from 28 jurisdictions have completed crisis intervention training since 2006, with the most recent five-day course having been given last month in Warren.
There, the training, which is free to police agencies, is sponsored by the Trumbull County Mental Health and Recovery Board and the Ohio Chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.