- NYAPRS Note: Following the tragic taser inflicted death of an Albany man with a mental health treatment history and the community protest march that followed, considerable attention is being focused on the results of an ongoing investigation into whether a less aggressive police response would have spared Dontay Ivy’s life.
The following article focuses on the Crisis Intervention Team initiative, an approach that has brought together local mental health, law enforcement, consumer and family representatives to design improved police and mental health system responses in over 300 localities nationwide. While Albany has had a CIT program for several years, it is unclear whether an adequate number of current Albany police officers have received the 40 hour training program and whether the local mental health system was best poised to respond at that hour.
The piece also emphasizes the critical importance of the $1.5 million for expanded CIT initiatives for which NYAPRS members and MHANYS successfully advocated during this year’s budget session and includes comments from Don Kamin, who’s been heading up the 8 locality initiative created by last year’s allocation.
The march featured signs entitled ‘Black Lives Matter’ (http://wnyt.com/article/stories/s3755963.shtml), in the spirit of a number of protests regarding police involved fatalities across our nation that have involved young African American men like Dontay Ivy. The Times Union has also reported that “It’s the third time in four years that a Capital Region man has died after being shocked by police armed with Tasers.”
Nonetheless, it’s important to emphasize that, at this time, there is no information available that police acted improperly or with any prejudice or whether they could have included a local mental health treatment response . Perhaps we will have more information for Don and our criminal justice panel to assess at next week’s NYAPRS Seminar.
Police And The Mentally Ill: Albany Death After Taser Use Raises Training Issue
Death After Taser Use In Albany Raises Questions About Policies
By Claire Hughes Albany Times Union April 5, 2015
When she called police because her 22-year-old son, Elijah, had become agitated during a holiday dinner, Neketa Roberts of Albany explained that he suffered from mental illness.
Despite the advance notice, police didn’t handle the situation well, according to her account.
“One of the officers told my son, ‘You need to calm down before I Tase you,’ ” Roberts said, referring to the use of a Taser, a brand of stun gun.
Roberts and her family told the cop he was out of line. Luckily, her son — who is 5 feet 9, 215 pounds, strong and sometimes difficult to control — was able to regain his composure. But the police officer’s approach may well have exacerbated the young man’s anxiety instead. The officer later told Roberts that he used the Taser threat “as a scare tactic” to get her son to obey him.
The father of Roberts’ son is Decky Lawson, a cousin of Donald “Dontay” Ivy, a mentally ill 39-year-old Albany man who died Thursday after being shocked by Tasers following a confrontation with city police officers.
The police department is investigating the circumstances leading to his death.
“I’m concerned because my son doesn’t look like he has mental health issues, and what happened to Dontay could happen to him,” said Roberts, who works in the University at Albany’s Office of Community Standards, which supports students with mental illness. “It seems to me like the cops are not trained properly to deal with people with mental health issues.”
Ivy’s death is the latest incident to draw attention to police response to mentally ill or emotionally disturbed people. The family of a 19-year-old Colonie man shot by State Police when he brandished a sword after a December car chase is suing the state for $10 million, contending police were told the man was mentally ill and should have had better protocols for handling the incident.
In the last six months, there have been at least three incidents in New York City where police may have used excessive force with suspects who turned out to have psychiatric disorders, said Glen Liebman, CEO of the Mental Health Association of New York State, an advocacy group also known as MHANYS.
What’s needed, said retired Troy Police Capt. John Cooney, is a change in police officers’ traditional thinking and tactics. Police are trained to be “warriors” — that’s the actual word used in the academy, he said — to enter a situation exerting complete control and authority.
“When you’ve got a bad guy sitting on the couch and you think he has a gun, and he’s someone with a pure criminal background, you treat that with lots of cops and lots of guns,” he said.
With an emotionally disturbed person, the appropriate response should be very different, said Cooney, who now trains police in how to use techniques to resolve such situations.
“We have to look at it not necessarily as catching the bad guy, but de-escalating, assessing the situation and getting the person help,” Cooney said. “We may not be there to put the suspect in a correctional facility, as much as put them in a therapeutic facility.”
In fact, traditional police methods of entering the scene of a disturbance can cause more harm than good when confronting someone suffering from mental illness, said John Richter, public policy director of MHANYS. Shouting orders, approaching someone aggressively or quickly or making them feel cornered can cause agitation or anxiety that only intensifies the problem.
“Those tactics they use can cause the situation to escalate,” Richter said.
Last week, lawmakers for the first time approved $1.5 million in state spending on training to improve police response to emotionally disturbed people during crises. Until now, such training has been sporadic.
Police academy students statewide receive two to three days of training in recognizing and handling mental health issues before they hit the streets. State troopers receive ongoing training in these issues throughout their careers, according to State Police spokesman Beau Duffy, but not all local cops receive the same.
A 40-hour program considered the most comprehensive approach to teaching police officers about mental health, called Crisis Intervention Teams (CIT), has been around for almost 30 years, but used by law enforcement agencies in only 10 counties statewide, including departments in Albany, Troy and Schenectady.
(It could not be determined whether any of the police officers involved in the confrontation with Ivy on Thursday had received training in crisis intervention or any other program. Acting Albany Police Chief Brendan Cox did not return a call seeking comment.)
In Monroe County, which includes Rochester, police departments have been trained in CIT or the related Emotionally Disturbed Persons Response Team (EDPRT) program since 2004, according to Don Kamin, a psychologist who directs the Institute for Police, Mental Health & Community Collaboration there. The training was first implemented in Memphis in 1988 after a police officer shot a man with a serious mental illness. In Rochester, too, the program got off the ground following the deaths of two people with mental illness whom the police had in custody at the time they died.
Investigations of such deaths often find police did nothing wrong because they followed established protocol for the circumstances, Kamin said.
“They did many times what they were supposed to do, which is focus in on the lawbreaking behavior, but not necessarily having the skills or knowledge to recognize the context in which it’s occurring,” Kamin said.
Specially trained CIT or EDPRT teams approach crises differently, using empathy and compassion, often with good results that go unnoticed, Kamin said. With very serious alleged crimes, the suspect will be brought to jail regardless of his mental soundness. But with lesser offenses, these teams use discretion in deciding whether to make an arrest and often bring individuals in crisis to a medical facility for care.
They are taught to not only notice, for instance, a person’s agitated state, but to listen to what’s being said. A trained officer might ask a simple question after an empathetic phrase in order to assess the person’s mental health history: “You seem like you’re having a hard time right now. Have you ever seen a counselor to talk about these problems?”
CIT or EDPRT must be a community-based collaboration to work, Kamin said, with solid relationships established between law enforcement, mental health professionals and the medical community.
CIT programs target getting 20 percent of officers in a department trained. Kamin said the aim is to enlist officers who already have some experience on the street and who have an interest in the training. Those who volunteer often have had some experience with mental illness among their families, friends or acquaintances.
“Not everybody is going to be a good CIT officer,” Kamin said. “We want to build on people’s strengths.”
And CIT isn’t a cure-all, or a method that will protect a person with mental illness in every crisis, Kamin stressed.
“There are times that the safety of the officer and other people in the surrounding environment is paramount, more so than the person whose exhibiting emotional disturbance,” he said.
Cooney believes CIT is very effective, but acknowledges a big limitation.
“It’s an organized response to an immediate crisis, but it’s not an immediate response to an immediate crisis,” Cooney said.
Cooney plans to incorporate into trainings a new program called Mental Health First Aid that helps anyone respond immediately to a crisis involving people who with mental illnesses.
Some police officers resist these new approaches, concerned for their own and others’ safety in situations that could become life-threatening, Cooney said. He tries to reassure them that none of the techniques he teaches should take precedence over officer or citizen safety.
Otherwise, the big challenge for most police departments is finding time for officers to get trained, Cooney said.
“It really is a pain in the neck to get the training when you’ve got guys working 24/7,” Cooney said. “But we can do it.”
Paul Grondahl contributed to this story. chughes@timesunion.com • 454-5417 •@hughesclaire