Mother Jones wants to know “What the Hell Happened to the Chicago Police’s ‘Crisis Intervention’ Training?” It’s not a bad question.
What exactly is crisis intervention training, and why does it matter?
“Crisis intervention is a type of police training that prepares officers for encounters with people who may be suffering from mental illnesses. A group of law enforcement officials, mental health experts, and community advocates started the first of these programs in Tennessee in 1988, after a Memphis police officer shot and killed a man with a history of mental illness. Such training can help reduce unnecessary arrests and use of force, research shows. Approximately 7 percent of all police encounters with the public have involved people with mental illnesses, according to one 1999 study. And the Washington Post's ongoing count of fatal police shootings in America suggests that number is on the rise. About a quarter of those killed by the police in 2015 were experiencing a mental illness or an emotional crisis, the Post estimates. Today, there are an estimated 2,700 crisis intervention programs across the country.”
Mother Jones wants to know specifically because of what happened to Quintonio LeGrier and Bettie Jones the day after Christmas. As Vann Newkirk II writes:
“Janet Cooksey says her 19-year-old son, Quintonio LeGrier, was a college honors student studying engineering who recently had been dealing with some mental health issues, reports CBS News correspondent Anna Werner.”
“Family members reportedly called police to their home Saturday because the teen was threatening his father with a baseball bat. Detectives described LeGrier as being ‘combative’ before he was shot.”
“I used to watch the news daily and I would grieve for other mothers, other family members, and now today I’m grieving myself,” said Janet Cooksey, LeGrier's mother. “When do it come to an end?”
“Fifty-five-year-old Bettie Jones, a mother of five, lived in the same building. She was reportedly waiting for police to respond, then got shot along with LeGrier.”
More than 250 people who had some form of mental illness were murdered by police in the United States last year. Persons with mental illness are 16 times more likely to die by cops than are people without mental illness.
According to Mother Jones, Chicago’s Crisis Intervention Training enjoyed the support of the-then police chief when it was first unveiled back in 2005. But he retired and soon thereafter, a perfect storm of sorts began to occur; budgetary cuts from the state of Illinois and staff cuts in the program whittled the number of employees down from 10 people to four.
Better training for cops around the issue of mental health means more than just being “ … effective in improving officers’ knowledge, attitude and skills and in increasing the referral or transport to services and decreasing arrests, as the American Psychiatric Association states. It keeps people freaking alive. Hello???
The other thing that is sorely needed around law enforcement interaction with persons with mental illness is accountability. Can we talk about that?
