New initiative pairs police with counselors for crisis calls
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OTTAWA COUNTY — In Holland, Zeeland and throughout Ottawa County, mental health clinicians this fall began riding along with cops in an effort to improve law enforcement’s response to calls involving mental illness and other personal crises.
The initiative, called a crisis intervention team, is not a new model. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, more than 2,700 cities and counties across the U.S. have adopted CITs, with the goal of better outcomes for people in crisis.
The officer-counselor duos are available five days a week to respond to calls involving suicidal people, substance abuse and any other behavioral health crises. If they’re not available, or a call comes in at night or on the weekend, the team follows up the next day.
“It’s the more complicated stuff,” said Tim Piers, CIT program coordinator. “That’s what we’re really set up to handle, stuff where there’s a lot of people needing different kinds of resources.”
On scene, the clinicians assess the person’s needs and connect him or her with resources that might be able to help. The aim is to find appropriate, long-term help for people so they are not unnecessarily jailed or hospitalized for mental health issues that could be treated instead.
“Prior to CIT, law enforcement would be answering calls from individuals that were in the middle of a crisis or suicidal ideations,” said Michele Sampson, Ottawa County Sheriff’s Office CIT deputy. “A lot of times, that would end up with that person being brought to a hospital, or if there was an issue other than that, they could be brought to the jail. With CIT now we are able to have resources with us so we can try to prevent having to bring someone into a hospital or into a jail.”
The counselors can spend more time with the people involved than the typical police-citizen encounter, allowing them to dig deeper into what the person’s needs are.
“The really nice thing about CIT is there is not necessarily a time limit or a time crunch on calls,” said Frankie Badur, mental health clinician with Ottawa County Community Mental Health. “If someone needs to be sitting down and talking for an hour, we have the capacity to do that. There’s not other calls backing up.”
“Establishing that trust and rapport with the person and their family members, I think that’s fairly priceless,” said OCCMH clinician Amanda Sheffield, who also works full-time with the CIT program.
It’s an investment law enforcement agencies hope will create longer-term solutions to the public safety problems connected to untreated mental illness and other social issues.
“This can be seen as a preventative measure as well,” Badur explained. “We’re able to field some of the calls that happen repeatedly for high utilizers of 911, and then we’re able to make contact and get them to whatever services they may need or want. That frees up a lot of the road patrol officers to handle all the other calls coming in.”
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The team started responding to calls for Holland police and the Ottawa County Sheriff’s Office in September.
“This is something Chief (Matt) Messer and and Sheriff (Steve) Kempker and the CMH (Ottawa County Community Mental Health) director Lynn Doyle have been talking about for some time,” Piers said, “and with some of the COVID-19 relief money coming through, there was an opportunity to put this team together.”
Another piece of the CIT model is collaboration and big-picture thinking about response to crisis, with law enforcement and social services agencies consulting with one another.
“We want everybody at the table to really look at what we’re doing well and where we can improve,” Piers said. “Part of that with CIT, too, is to identify the gaps and give everybody involved the best tools possible to handle any crisis situation.”
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Sampson and Holland Department of Public Safety Officer Austin Engerson underwent a 40-hour CIT training at Wayne State University to prepare for the job.
Zeeland Police Department recently signed on, too, though the officer assigned to CIT, Dylan Ousley, has not gone through the training yet. Ousley screens through calls that Zeeland police responded to and identifies calls concerning mental health and suicidal thoughts to bring Badur and Sheffield to for a follow-up.
“It kind of ends up being a revolving door because when they get out (of jail) they keep falling back on their behaviors that are caused by their illnesses,” Ousley said, explaining the philosophy behind the CIT approach. “So why don’t we address the root problem, their illness, so we can avoid the criminal justice system and get them the help they really need?”
The plan is for more local law enforcement officers to also undergo the training so that even if a CIT clinician isn’t available they have the training and tools to make referrals themselves.
“We’re in the process of developing our own training to make that available to all local law enforcement in Ottawa County,” Piers said. “We hope to see over the coming years a quarter of law enforcement, roughly, being CIT-trained, so any time there’s a mental health or substance-use-related crisis, a CIT officer will be available to respond.”
“The research on these programs shows that they reduce the burden on law enforcement and the justice system as well as on mental health and medical side of things.”
— Contact reporter Carolyn Muyskens at cm*******@ho*************.com and follow her on Twitter at @cjmuyskens.
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