Crisis Intervention Training
The Summary
The Police-Based Crisis Intervention Team Model is examined in the article to improve officers’ responses to individuals with behavioral disorders. The article focuses on the levels of force utilized for officers with or without training and disposition decisions on crisis intervention teams—large samples of encounters with individuals with any disability. The crisis intervention team is a model that collaborates the law enforcement, advocacy, and mental health communities’ efforts; that seek to improve encounters on individuals with serious mental illnesses and the police. The article identifies the CIT model’s goals, including improving the officer’s safety and subject, minimizing the use of force, and facilitation of referral to treatment instead of incarceration.
Prior research that set the foundation for the article is based on a sample of police encounters in Georgia from March to November. The information was collected from a crisis intervention team (CIT) training from each agency who served as a liaison to the study team. The literature on the crisis intervention team model focuses on the fundamental aspect of the CIT model is 40-hour training that provides officers with knowledge and techniques essential in the identification of signs and symptoms of mental illness and the appropriate making dispositions.
The article methods involve participation of law enforcement agencies and officers, encounter form and encounter variables, and statistical analyses. The participation of law enforcement and officers which involved a report based on a sample of police encounters that increase both the size and representativeness of the sample. The engagement of the divers urban and suburban law enforcement agencies that had implemented CIT within three to five years. The encounter form was developed through reviewing literature and forms for reporting on CIT programs. The encounter form has the primary variables as the level of force and disposition. The forms also engage whether a subject has a serious mental illness, a drug, or an alcohol problem, or a developmental disability. Statistical analyses using SPSS was a method utilized to recode and examine the distributional properties of variables. Descriptive analysis of statistics reported primarily in percentages. Odds ratios, OR, were used to characterize the effects of officers’ CIT training status. The ORs are less than 1 when the CIT percentage is higher than the non-percentage and more than 1 when it is not.
In conclusion, new findings emerged from the study, which suggests an escalation of encounter to the levels of physical maneuvers or force. There was no effect of the use of force for an officer with CIT training and those without it. The article identifies that the subject’s resistance drives the officer’s response on the force continuum before research and officer standard training. The impact of the 40-hour CIT training enhances the use of techniques by an officer in encounters. The CIT program’s effect was confirmed to help a trained officer resolve a more significant proportion of calls that involved persons with mental illness by connecting them to mental health services. The impact of the article involves more focus on research needed on a system-level to accompany the efforts of the officer-level, as found in the related study. CIT training does not affect the use of force but increases the likelihood that the officer will refer the subjects to services and transport them to the treatment facility.
Reference
“The Police-Based Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) Model: II. Effects on Level of Force and Resolution, Referral, and Arrest.” Psychiatric Services, 1 Apr. 2014, retrieved from ps.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ps.201300108
