Police Crisis Intervention & The Illinois Model
Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) training has received a lot of attention lately, as it should. Police officers are too often tasked with picking up where a broken mental healthcare system left off. Law enforcement has been doing a less-than-stellar job with this function. It only makes sense that, if these mental health crises are going to be shoved off to the police as often as they are, our officers receive training and education in how to respond most effectively. Sadly, our police officers are not being trained properly. The current CIT model is not up-to-task. In this blog post, I’m going to make some suggestions to make the current CIT models even better. It involves a comprehensive approach using The Illinois Model™ . What is CIT? Maybe you shouldn’t be reading this article if you don’t know exactly what the police Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) program is about. Regardless, let me give an extremely abbreviated (and crude) summary: