MANCHESTER, NH – Law enforcement agencies are scrambling to get a seat in a popular training program called Crisis Intervention Training (CIT), but access is limited, applicants are being added to a waitlist, and the price can be high for a department to run a class. But police and mental health experts say it’s worth it.
Before a handful of senior Manchester Police officers started testing the waters with CIT training in Maryland about eight years ago, the way the department handled cases involving a mental health crisis was very different.
Chief Carlo Capano said patrol officers would come to a call for someone experiencing psychosis or some other form of mental crisis and, given few options at the time, they would arrest the person for involuntary admission and then bring them to the Mental Health Center of Greater Manchester for screening.
“It really just victimized the person who was in a crisis situation,” Capano said.
The idea behind CIT is to train officers on the ways mental illnesses or disabilities manifest, how to respond appropriately to deescalate the situation and ultimately divert them away from the criminal justice system to community mental healthcare.
Manchester Mental Health President Bill Rider said it makes police safer and boosts officer morale when they are able to help a person in crisis and keep them out of jail.
“The officers feel good when they don’t have to arrest somebody. They don’t really like that. It’s a big pain in the ass,” Rider said. “Those are good outcomes for the police department and good outcomes for the community.”
Over the past several years, the popularity of the program has caught on in law enforcement circles. But the supply can’t keep up with the demand.
“It’s extremely important especially considering the crisis that we’re in,” Capano said.
Manchester currently has 73 out of 239 sworn officers and 5 dispatchers who are CIT trained and each wear a pin identifying them as members of the department’s Crisis Intervention Team. Members of that team are directed to calls related to mental health crises and are embedded in the city’s Mobile Crisis Unit. The department also has some dispatchers trained in the program so they can identify cases that need to be assigned to a CIT officer.
Capano said they used to have more officers certified in the training, which requires annual recertification, but some retired in recent years. The department planned on doing a training this spring but that was delayed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. They hope to train about 22 more officers in the fall, Capano said.
Rider said the community mental health center and police department were able to pool resources in 2016 as they were forming the Mobile Crisis Unit to increase training.
Nashua Police has about 25 to 30 officers that have gone through the program, according to Nashua Chief Michael Carignan. He said Nashua started doing the training about four or five years ago in collaboration with Manchester.
They still collaborate with the Queen City as needed when responding to certain calls, and they help neighboring communities like Merrimack as well.
Other departments also have a handful of officers trained in CIT. State Police Col. Nate Noyes said recently that he estimates most departments who do the training only have up to about 8 to 10 percent of their sworn officers certified in CIT.
Through a federal grant from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 225 New Hampshire State Police troopers will receive the training. The three-year, $102,000 annual grant started in 2018.
Ken Norton of NAMI NH, which is facilitating the training, said they have trained 123 troopers so far. They are opening a few seats in each training session to local fire and EMS people as well.
NAMI is also hosting a CIT training for local police departments in Dover on Aug. 17, using a $10,000 grant from the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services. Norton said they have about 20 to 25 seats and they’ll likely be working off of an existing waitlist to determine who gets in.
Capano said it’s been his goal since he became chief to get every single Manchester officer CIT certified.
“Obviously funding would be the main issue we would run into,” he said. “I think it’s a difficult goal but I think it’s a worthwhile one.”
Capano said a training session, which lasts a few days, costs about $6,000, and the cost for overtime and shift coverage is another $10,000 roughly. Annual refresher training costs vary based on shift coverage needs.
Eventually, Capano wants to make the training part of the standard in-house training that every new officer takes.
“In a perfect world, I think every agency should be trained on this,” Capano said.
John Scippa, the New Hampshire Police Academy director, recently said CIT was one of two mental health de-escalation training models he recommended for every officer in the state, but it was the more expensive of the options and therefore less feasible.
Plus, it would be an added burden on local police departments to cover the cost of annual recertification.
Norton said he is planning on proposing an extension and expansion of the current training program, to keep training state troopers, and to improve their reach to more local departments.
Manchester officers are trained in partnership with Manchester Mental Health, and they hire faculty from out of state. Rider said the training was facilitated in the past by Thomas Kucharski PhD of John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. Lately, it’s been provided by Associate Professor Diana Falkenbach PhD, according to Rider.
The training itself consists of some classroom learning about different kinds of mental illnesses and conditions like autism, and there’s a section where officers role-play with actors, usually clinicians from Manchester Mental Health.
Rider said it helps to undo some of the assumptions that officers might have in a tense situation. For instance, when an officer tells someone to stop and put their hands up but that person doesn’t immediately comply, there is traditionally an assumption of criminality.
The training works to show cops that sometimes people may not immediately comply because they are deaf, autistic or mentally ill, and there are ways officers may identify those signs early on.
Norton said it also helps to humanize mentally ill people in the eyes of police officers.
In the case of the NAMI role-play training, some of the people acting out scenarios like cutting themselves in a locked bathroom, or responding to voices in their head in a public space are people who have suffered similar mental crises in the past and are now managing their symptoms, according to Norton. After the roleplay, they reveal to the troopers that they were once in that very situation, which Norton said is an eye-opening and powerful experience.
Norton said troopers are also given a tour of the state mental hospital in Concord and some community mental health centers.
When the program started in Manchester, officers weren’t sure what to make of the training.
“Initially the officers were skeptical of what this program was about,” Capano said.
After the first cohort of certified officers started using their new skills, and other officers witnessed how well it worked, they embraced it.
“Now we get an overwhelming amount of people who want to get involved in this program,” Capano said.
Rider said he thinks the initial assumptions about CIT was that it was teaching a softer approach to policing that focused too much on feelings. But as more people got trained and it grew in popularity, even the tactically trained officers took an interest. In the last training, Rider noted that members of the SWAT team and officers trained in hostage negotiation attended.
“You would probably think (they are) the most militaristic arm of the police department. And I think for those guys to be very interested in learning about and becoming a part of CIT I think is really cool,” Rider said.
And perhaps as a result of that intersection, Rider said he was heartened to learn that a recently-deployed SWAT team in Manchester called in CIT officers to a situation and successfully talked someone dealing with a mental health crisis down. Although Manchester Police Capt. Brian O’Keefe says their SWAT crisis negotiators are CIT trained and are at every call out, Rider said for police to bring in mental health specialist after things escalate to the point of deploying tactical units has, at least previously, been the exception rather than the rule.
