Mental health crisis officers paying off

Jen Lawson

Friday, March 28, 2003 | 9:18 a.m.

In 2001, after Metro Police officers shot two mentally ill people, one fatally, then-Sheriff Jerry Keller and mental health experts began exploring ways to try to avoid those kinds of outcomes.

The result is the Crisis Intervention Team, a group of specially trained patrol officers who will be called out to handle calls involving the mentally ill.

Twenty-nine Metro patrol officers and two North Las Vegas officers volunteered to undergo 40 hours of training provided by local mental health professionals who volunteered their time last month.

The officers began putting their training into practice March 1, and Metro announced Thursday that the program appears to be a success so far so they will expand it.

"Lots of people who are getting appropriate assistance would have fallen between the cracks before," Capt. Ted Moody said.

The crisis team officers are regular patrol officers who handle regular calls, but when a call involving a mentally ill person comes in, the dispatcher will send the closest team member to the scene to speak with the person and try to find ways to help.

Depending on the circumstances, a mentally ill person may agree to be dropped off at WestCare's 50-bed Community Triage Center at Fourth Street and Washington Avenue. In the past, the same person would have been taken to an emergency room or to jail. A bigger, 100-bed mental center is planned for Martin Luther King Boulevard and Alta Drive, Moody said.

Gary Peck, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada, has criticized Metro in the past for not doing enough to address the issue of the mentally ill.

"They are to be commended for doing this kind of training," Peck said. "It's very obvious that ours is a state with woefully inadequate resources for the mentally ill. The largest public mental health facility is the jail."

Metro modeled its program after one established in 1988 by Memphis Police.

Vic Davis, president of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill of Nevada, suggested the idea to Metro two years ago and watched the department develop the program. He said he traveled to Memphis last year and did a ride-along with a Crisis Intervention Team officer.

"There's a real trust that grows between the CIT officers and the mentally ill," Davis said. "Mentally ill people are, by nature, paranoid. But when they see a CIT officer, they come over and start talking."

Davis attended Metro's first training session and found the officers who volunteered for the program to be more compassionate, and he said many of the officers volunteered for the program because they have family members with mental illness.

Officer Fred Castle is one of them. He signed up for the training because of his experience with his father's Alzheimer's disease. His father was arrested because police didn't have proper training, he said.

He also knows the importance of following up with the mentally ill person and his or her family, because he's been there.

"The big thing is to say, 'I care,' " Castle said.

Another class of 30 patrol officers, including some from Henderson, will be trained in April. Metro hopes to eventually have 15 percent of its patrol force complete the training.