Crisis Intervention Trainings (CIT) were developed in 1988 in Memphis, Tennessee as a way to offer “a mental health solution to mental health crisis” in the words of NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
As NAMI writes, “Law enforcement and jails continue to be the de facto system for responding to mental health crisis situations and housing people with mental illness. Law enforcement agencies are under immense pressure to address this systemic challenge. The goal of CIT is not to train officers to be kinder and gentler as they take people to jail. The goal of CIT is to keep people safe, which isn’t possible if jail is the only destination during a mental health crisis. A CIT program should help people get connected to treatment and services and offer hope for recovery. That can only be accomplished when law enforcement agencies build relationships with mental health professionals and agencies and work with advocates to fight for a better mental health system.”
Since its creation in 1988, the 40-hour CIT training curriculum has become one of the most common forms of crisis response training for police, adopted by more than 2,700 U.S. police agencies. CIT training covers the range of conditions that contribute to behavioral crises and aims to enhance officers’ empathy toward the individuals concerned and improve their skills in managing crisis events safely. CIT training requires collaboration with other first responders, medical and mental health care providers, advocacy groups, and other stakeholders.
While partner organizations do not co-respond to the scene of crisis incidents, police share ownership of the program with community-based partners such as clinicians and advocates. The team works together to plan and implement the program, establish policies and procedures, create and deliver training for CIT officers and dispatchers, and conduct program evaluation and research.
Weapons from the Decator PD de-escalation training
In response to mixed evidence that officers with CIT training are less likely to use force on mental and behavioral health calls, and after a 2016 study showed that many of the officers involved in fatal police shootings of subjects displaying signs of mental illness, the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), developed the Integrating Communications, Assessment, and Tactics (ICAT) training. This article, published under Biden’s National Institute for Justice, discusses the development of ICAT training and the ways it complements CIT training.
In traditional training, officers learn to take charge of a volatile encounter. They’re taught that responsibility for their own safety and the safety of their fellow officers is paramount, which often means entering an unstable situation with weapons drawn. The message, said Chief of Police in Boulder CO Maris Herold, is “make sure that you and your partner go home safe tonight.”
ICAT has a different emphasis. Rather than taking charge, officers learn to reframe their roles as active listeners who gather intelligence to resolve situations by building rapport without resorting to force. For Herold, the words “Nobody is going to die tonight” embodies ICAT’s approach. Nobody, meaning no one in law enforcement—and no civilians.
Officers going through ICAT training were concerned, however, with the unintended consequences that this shift might have. Dr. Robin Engel, a criminology researcher who has spearheaded efforts to evaluate ICAT, described officers’ fears as, “You’re going to teach us to hesitate, and you’re going to get us killed.”
What could help overcome these officers’ resistance to an approach so different from the one they’d been learning and practicing for their entire careers?
The answers lie in research and evidence.
…Initially, [Louisville Police Department] Sergeant Witt shared both the field’s skepticism of ICAT and law enforcement’s broader reluctance to let researchers into their agencies. He was convinced, he said, that research meant “some outside group’s going to come in, they’re going to say ‘This is why you’re horrible, and this is how you need to do better,’ and we’re going to be treated like test dummies.”
Instead, Sergeant Witt and the Louisville police found themselves in dialogue with [National Policing Institute researcher] Dr. Engel and her team. Before the study results were published, Dr. Engel discussed with Sergeant Witt what was going right with ICAT and where the points of failure were. Together, they designed modifications to the training program to address those shortcomings.
According to Dr. Engel’s findings, ICAT produced significant changes not only in officers’ attitudes and knowledge about de-escalation, but also in their actual behavior on patrol. Officer uses of force and civilian injuries were each down by more than 25 percent after ICAT training. Unexpectedly, injuries to officers were down even more, by 36 percent. Law enforcement agencies that had objected that ICAT would get their officers killed could now see empirical evidence pointing to the opposite outcome.
Dr. Engel’s team also found weaknesses in the ICAT model. Supervisors were not reinforcing the de-escalation paradigm that patrol officers learned in the trainings, which led to training decay—i.e., the weakening of ICAT’s impact over time. The centerpiece of ICAT, its critical decision-making model, was the fastest piece to decay—a major concern not just for the Louisville police, but also for the PERF team that was championing ICAT across the United States.
In Louisville, Sergeant Witt’s agency developed a supplementary program specifically to help align supervisors with ICAT. Additionally, at PERF’s ICAT facility in Decatur, Illinois, the standard program curriculum now includes a “Supervisor Snapshot” component designed to address the shortcomings that Dr. Engel’s research identified.
Reflecting on the research experience, Sergeant Witt highlighted the transformative nature of his back-and-forth, collaborate relationship with Dr. Engel. Their communication was key to building trust between the Louisville police and the research team. “You’re not going to have behavior change from a law enforcement agency until you develop some rapport to make us understand what is it that you’re actually trying to do,” Sergeant Witt explained.
As a part of our research process, the cast of The Scenarios used some of the following videos to get a sense of how these trainings run. (Note: All trainings take place under controlled conditions; none of these videos include persons in actual emotional distress.)
2-minute report on scenario-based training for crisis De-Escalation training in DC
3-minute NAMI video to recruit volunteers to share their experience as someone, or the family or someone, affected by mental illness. The training isn’t quite the same as the model in The Scenarios, but the video offers interiors of police cars and training buildings.
3-minute report from the Aurora Police showing scenario-based training. The audience seems to be the general public or potential officers instead of officers.
This is specifically ICAT training, which is a little different than CIT training that we see in The Scenarios, but the videos offer images of police and actors working together in a police academy
6-minute Facebook video with the folks who developed ICAT. The basics of the training and footage of the training with the Decatur Police Department.
These trainings are outdoors or in stairways, so it feels different than an Academy-based training protocol.