[Blogger’s Note: I am very pleased to share this post by my colleague at Seton Hall Law, Tara Adams Ragone. This post was cross-posted at Health Reform Watch.]
By Tara Adams Ragone
Social media recently focused my attention on two very different law enforcement interactions with people with mental illness that reinforce the need for increased training of law enforcement in crisis intervention as well as the need for improved access to treatment for people with mental illness.
The first is a video of the fatal police shooting of Kajieme Powell in St. Louis, Missouri earlier this month. Mr. Powell was twenty-five years old and suspected of shoplifting junk food from a convenience store. The first eighty seconds of the video show Mr. Powell pacing and muttering on the sidewalk — with four pedestrians passing by without incident — before the police arrive. The police then exited their vehicles with their guns drawn, shouted at Mr. Powell to drop his weapon, and fired about twelve shots fewer than twenty seconds after they arrived on the scene.
The second is an NPR story that included an audio recording of law enforcement officials in San Antonio, Texas responding to a 911 call about a twenty-four year old group home resident named Mason, who was off of his medications, had set his blanket on fire, and was a danger to himself and others. When they arrived at the scene, the officers acknowledged that they did not use the “tough guy command voice” that they typically would in responding to a 911 call reporting suspected criminal activity. Instead, in plain clothes and without their weapons drawn, they spoke calmly with Mason, reassuring him that they wanted to get him help. They astutely noticed signs suggesting that Mason was experiencing tactile, auditory, and visual hallucinations, and with patience and skilled questioning, got him to acknowledge the hallucinations and seek psychiatric treatment.
The San Antonio officers were members of a six-person mental health squad that the city created to confront severe prison overcrowding. As NPR correspondent Jenny Gold reported, the city and county have saved $5 million and eliminated prison overcrowding over the past five years by diverting people with mental illness out of prisons and overcrowded emergency rooms and into appropriate mental health treatment. Officers must take forty hours of crisis intervention team (“CIT”) training to help them learn how to handle mental health crises.
By juxtaposing the St. Louis and San Antonio incidents, I am not suggesting that they necessarily can be fairly compared. The facts that were available to the officers in each situation may have justified different law enforcement responses. The San Antonio officers were warned in advance that Mason may have been experiencing increased symptoms of mental illness and, when they arrived, Mason was sitting by himself without any suspected weapon. In contrast, the St. Louis 911 call reportedly did not raise any concerns that Mr. Powell was suffering from a mental illness. In addition, the police claim that Mr. Powell was brandishing a knife as he approached the officers, and a knife reportedly was recovered at the scene. Michael Woody, a CIT expert and former police trainer in Akron, Ohio, has opined that the St. Louis scene was not stable enough for the CIT protocol to be appropriate. (But query whether other tactics short of lethal force could have controlled the situation and spared Mr. Powell’s life.)
The starkly different outcomes in these cases shine a spotlight on the potential for CIT training to arm officers with effective tools to help de-escalate mental health crises in appropriate cases. In a December 2012 article in the Community Mental Health Journal, Kelli E. Canada, Beth Angell, and Amy C. Watson summarized some of the preliminary findings of CIT effectiveness, including:
- “improved officer preparedness and improved disposition of mental health calls”
- “improved attitudes, increased knowledge and patience, and an increase in support of local treatment programs”
- “the potential to reduce stigma and alter beliefs about mental illness”
- “increases in the number of identified mental health calls[,] . . . transports to treatment by CIT officers[,] . . ., and voluntary transports”
- “increasing access to mental health services through linking individuals with community providers”
An analysis of interviews these researchers conducted of CIT and non-CIT trained officers in Chicago “uncovered three specific areas that CIT trained officers demonstrated specialized procedures in comparison to non-CIT trained officers: assessment, response tactics, and disposition.”
Here in New Jersey, Camden was the first city to use CIT training back in 2008, and eleven New Jersey counties currently have CIT programs. A Union County officer reported that the training caused him to think twice before curtly shuffling a homeless man along. Instead by talking with the man, the officer learned that he was suicidal and convinced him to seek treatment for his previously undiagnosed schizophrenia. New Jersey should continue to expand CIT programs in law enforcement agencies throughout the state.
But, as the St. Louis incident reminds us, CIT training alone is not enough. (Indeed, reportedly one of the officers involved in the shooting of Mr. Powell was CIT-trained.) New Jersey also needs to invest in treatment services for patients with mental illness, both to help them avoid a crisis and to have appropriate and available treatment options when they reach a crisis. Officers need places to bring or refer individuals in need of mental health treatment. Yet patients often report difficulty trying to access appropriate mental health services in New Jersey as in other states. We need to be sure there are adequate networks of providers to meet the needs of people with mental illness.
Given current fiscal realities, it is unclear how New Jersey will fund efforts to improve mental health access. Gold reports that jails, hospitals, courts, police, and the mental health department in San Antonio banded together to build the Restoration Center, which offers an array of mental and physical health services, including “a 48-hour inpatient psychiatric unit; outpatient services for psychiatric and primary care; centers for drug or alcohol detox; a 90-day recovery program for substance abuse; plus housing for people with mental illnesses, and even job training.”
New Jersey agencies similarly should explore ways to coordinate. Given the cost savings San Antonio has realized, perhaps New Jersey should revisit the role for social impact financing to improve mental health network adequacy.
