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Police deal with mental illness often and try to provide resources

Norwalk Reflector
Jul 01, 2020

Jul. 1--NORWALK -- Police are usually the first to respond to mental health crises, which is becoming controversial as the discussion of police reform continues due to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Geoffrey Melada, director of communications for the Treatment Advocacy Center, said a report found that law enforcement spends 1/5 of its time on mental health calls and an average of 10 percent of law enforcement agencies' budgets were spent responding to and transporting those with mental illnesses in 2017. The Treatment Advocacy Center also found that the average distance transporting an individual in a mental health crisis to a medical facility was 5 times farther than the distance to transport them to jail.

"We also found the reasons that police are so often called to do these responses is that it is, on average, five times longer to get a mental health facility than a jail for most responses," Melada said. "So, perhaps unsurprisingly, police are the ones who respond and jails are where people end up."

Norwalk's former police chief and current mayor, Dave Light, said the police department works with the Huron CountyBoard of Mental Health and Addiction Services (MHAS) to provide resources to those with mental illness in custody.

While chief, Light said about half of the police officers in Norwalk's department went through Crisis Intervention Team (CIT), but when the recession hit, funds for training dried up. He said he believes CIT should be mandatory for officers to go through.

"When you step out of your cruiser, the officer, he or she has to immediately assess the situation and act, and you have split seconds," Norwalk's mayor said. "You never know what stage of mental illness they're in or what they're diagnosed with. Someone who's bipolar and acting manic will act differently than someone who's into a deep depression."

Melada said they recommend police departments follow best practices of CIT program training, and the training should be voluntary for officers who are interested in having "a larger role in this specialized law enforcement mental health response."

"However, because all law enforcement officers may come into contact with someone experiencing a mental health crisis, all officers, especially patrol, should have some training and mental health response and de-escalation," Melada said.

Light said Huron County is fortunate to have Fisher-Titus so close because those involved in a mental health call have to be evaluated by a physician. He said 30 years ago they had to travel to Toledo's mental health center.

Ron Bruno, executive director of CIT International, said due to an underfunded behavioral health system, law enforcement became the primary responders for mental health crises.

"Law enforcement is actually very good at trying to address those issues, but unfortunately the funding never did go to the mental health system. Law enforcement had to try to figure out ways to actually become better at it and that's where CIT actually was developed," Bruno said.

"It is a law enforcement based program that really does try to build those community partnerships to build the community, behavioral health services. As time has progressed though we are now starting to see a shift of the realization that we do need to build community crisis response services, independent of law enforcement."

He said most of the time, the crisis calls that go to 911 do not require a law enforcement response and could be handled by a crisis line or community response team.

Bruno said all police officers should not go through CIT because it takes a "special officer to actually have the desire to work with this special population."

"We need to identify those special officers give them the specialized training and make them specialists that they need to be so when a call for service comes up involving behavioral health issues and it justifiably requires a law enforcement response, we have a trained specialist that can go out," Bruno said.

"Not only to identify that they're dealing with behavioral health issues but be able to de-escalate it. But then on top of it, know their community resources well enough that they can get this person connected to the help that they need."

He said communities need to build up behavioral health resources by creating 24/7 crisis lines, and a "warm line" for those who are not in crisis but need to speak with someone.

"We need to build what is called a mobile crisis outreach team. Hopefully, that is made up by a clinician, and the second person would be a certified peer specialist," Bruno said.

He said these mobile crisis teams can provide stabilizing care for those in crisis without ever leaving their homes.

"Most crisis calls for service can be resolved at that level without ever sending law enforcement out into the field. If we do need to send somebody out, we don't want to necessarily send police if there's not a level of danger that requires it," Bruno said.

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