More coverage detailing efforts urging state budget negotiators to include funding for a statewide Crisis Intervention Team initiative in the impending budget agreement.
Budget Push To Train Police On Handling The Mentally Ill
By Laura Nahmias Capital New York March 27, 2014
ALBANY—When Binghamton police shot and killed a 56-year-old diagnosed schizophrenic named Peter Sablich more than seven years ago, it prompted some soul-searching in Broome County.
Sablich, an immigrant from the former Soviet Union, set a fire in his own house on a cold night in 2006. He could have been committing arson, or he may have been trying to warm himself, said Lori Accardi, executive director of Catholic Charities of Broome County, the social services agency where Sablich used to receive treatment.
When police and firefighters responded to 911 calls about the fire, Sablich, who spoke little English, came out of his home with an object in his hands, and officers drew their weapons, calling on him to drop his own. He didn’t.
“They fired on him from several positions and killed him, and what they found in his hand was a kitchen knife,” Accardi said.
Broome County District Attorney Gerald Mollen conducted an official inquiry, which found that first responders were increasingly being called to deal with incidents involving people with serious mental illnesses, even as hospital facilities to treat such people have become scarce over the last half-century. (In 1999, New York State had just 6,000 patients in psychiatric hospitals, down from 93,000 in 1953.)
The resulting report concluded that interactions with the mentally ill “are among the most difficult tasks of police work,” and called it “essential that police officers be appropriately trained to respond to arrestees with mental illness.”
Eight years later, mental health advocates still point to Sablich’s death as emblematic of a problem that plagues New York State, where such incidents are on the rise, and police training is still largely left to local jurisdictions with widely different standards for training officers in how to respond to mental illness.
Advocates in New York are pushing the state to pass a law in its annual budget this year, which would create voluntary training programs for police and first-responders, with a program called crisis intervention training.
While many states already have such programs, only three police departments in New York State provide formal training for officers on how to interact with the mentally ill. (The three departments are in Westchester, Nassau and Monroe counties.)
New York’s program, which would cost about $2 million a year, would be modeled on similar successful programs in San Francisco and Philadelphia, said Harvey Rosenthal, head of the New York State Association of Psychiatric Rehabilitation Services, one of the advocacy groups pushing for the bill.
The measure is being discussed as part of ongoing budget negotiations, and has support from Independent Democratic Senator David Carlucci, the chairman of the Senate’s mental health committee, and Democratic Assembly members including Jeff Aubry and Aileen Gunther.
Next week, New York City Councilwoman Rosie Mendez plans to introduce a resolution in the city to push for passage of laws creating crisis-intervention programs.
The NYPD has resisted calls to create similar programs in the past, including in 2008, when several police groups called on the department to create a special intervention unit after a mentally ill Brooklyn man fell to his death after being stunned with a Taser.
A spokesperson for the department, which handles 23 million incidents a year and received 120,000 calls in 2013 from people who are emotionally disturbed, said officers are “trained extensively” on how to respond to calls from emotionally disturbed people, including training from psychiatric experts. Members of the force’s Emergency Service Unit and Hostage Negotiation team also receive training from mental health professionals.
“The NYPD is always willing to review programs that can help assist the public,” said NYPD spokeswoman Kim Royster in a statement. “The department will be assessing several crisis intervention models that range from responding to persons with substance abuse, non-residency and mental illness,” she said.
But advocates say that training is meager at best, and doesn’t foster long-term relationships between the mental health advocacy community and the police.
Advocates say they haven’t been able to obtain official data from the NYPD about the breadth of the department’s training programs, but Carla Rabinowitz, the community organizer for Community Access, a nonprofit mental health services provider, said the department’s crisis training is “between 8 and 16 hours of training annually,” with 1.5 hours of training with psychiatric health experts.
By contrast, a comprehensive crisis intervention-training (C.I.T.) model would be 40 hours of training per year, she said.
“At the core of a crisis-intervention team is a partnership between the police and the mental health community. We don’t have that in New York City,” she said. “People are afraid of the police.”
Richard Corriea, a commander with the San Francisco Police Department, said police officers are often following their training when they use deadly force, calling those cases “lawful but awful.”
“It’s a legally sound, but awful outcome that doesn’t sit well with anybody,” he said.
San Francisco has about 2,000 officers on its police force and began its crisis intervention program about two years ago. The department gets roughly 16,000 calls a year, coded “800” calls that involve a person who is mentally ill.
“We call them wild 800s,” Corriea said.
What officers learn from crisis intervention training is that “people that are mentally ill don’t present any greater risk to officers than the general public,” Corriea said.
Most incidents in which police shoot someone who is mentally ill happen almost immediately after officers respond to an emergency call. Crisis intervention training instructs officers to recognize signs of possible mental illness, and take their time if the person in question isn’t in a position to harm anyone. That tactic —”give space, buy time” —can prevent death, and can spare officers the trauma of deadly force, according to advocates.
“If you’re an officer and you hurt someone, you may survive the encounter but you have to live with it,” Corriea said.
“You wonder why officers kill themselves? It’s because they see a lot of things and go through a lot,” said Patrick Healy, special adviser to Philadelphia’s police commissioner. “None of us signed up to hurt anybody.”
Healy, who runs the crisis intervention training program for Philadelphia police officers, said “officers kind of have a mindset of it’s ‘us versus them’ for people with problems.”
Healy said his training tries to help officers understand how difficult it can be to communicate in those situations, and how quickly miscommunication can lead to irreparable consequences.
“I ask, ‘Who here has ever been in a crisis?’” he said. “I ask, ‘Who here has ever lost a girlfriend and thought your life was over?’ Everyone raises their hand. Imagine if you ever intersected with a police officer who didn’t know what was going on?”