Officers focusing on crisis intervention

Saturday, March 6, 2010
Officers focusing on crisis intervention

By: Todd South
(Contact)

A man calls police because his brother, a Vietnam War veteran, is acting strangely, not taking his medications and saying angry words, but the vet hasn't broken any laws.

What do officers do?

"Before, you would go out to the calls and you didn't know any other options except jail," said Chattanooga Police Department Officer Joe Kerns. "They don't need to go to jail. Mostly they need help with their mental illness."

Since September 2009, the Crisis Intervention Team training program in Hamilton County has helped teach law enforcement officers how to deal with such volatile situations, both for their own safety and the safety of the mentally ill and their families.

Officer Kerns and Hamilton County Sheriff's Deputy Stephen Short graduated from the first Crisis Intervention Team training in September 2009. They were on hand this week as role players for the second class of trainees.

Throughout the role-playing exercise, students took turns talking with Deputy Short, a former Marine, who played the part of a Vietnam veteran having mental difficulties.

Each participant approached the veteran and talked with him in a calm tone of voice, despite Deputy Short's shouting and haphazard actions, including lining stools in a row, shouting commands and dropping to do pushups.

Crisis intervention focuses mostly on working with people who either have a mental illness and are behaving erratically or with people who might be in a stressed mental state and not otherwise thinking clearly, said retired Maj. Sam Cochran, formerly of the Memphis Police Department.
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Officers focusing on crisis intervention