By Charlie Deitz
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Pittsfield, MA – When new police officers graduate from the academy, they generally have little to no training on how to deal with mentally ill citizens. WAMC's Berkshire Bureau Chief Charlie Deitz reports that a handful of Berkshire County cops graduated from a training program that gives them the tools to deal with a crisis
At Berkshire Community College an actor is portraying a distraught citizen about to jump from a bridge, two real police officers are engaging him and trying to talk him down.
The two officers have just completed what's called Crisis intervention training, or CIT, an initiative launched by the National Alliance on Mental Illness, or NAMI, aimed at giving cops the tools to deal with situations that fall outside of standard law enforcement, Ron Honberg is NAMI's National legal affairs director, he
explains that hundreds of law enforcement agencies in the united states have undergone what he says is more than just a training seminar.
At Berkshire Community College, 25 public safety workers including municipal, state and even college campus police are now graduated with a new skill set for handling crisis situations involving mentally ill citizens. The training was administered by a partnership between the district attorney's office, the sheriff's office and the local NAMI chapter. Major Thomas Grady from the Berkshire Sheriffs Office tells the class that with recent closures of state run mental health hospitals, many patients are running into the law out in the world.
Representative Paul Mark, who sits on the House Mental Health Committee, was on hand to congratulate the officers, and to tell them about a bill pending in the house to expand CIT.
Assistant District Attorney for Berkshire County Paul Caccaviello says budget cuts to mental health services are leaving holes in treatment options, meaning the police are the first ones who have a chance to get citizens into programs, and right now the courts are seeing a growing number of things like competency hearings.
Egremont Police Chief Reena Bucknell already attended the training in Connecticut a few years ago, so she stepped in as one of the trainers for this 40 hour week long session.
NAMI reports that CIT trainings not only help reduce the rate of mentally ill inmates, but have shown to help reduce police and citizen injuries and deaths during crisis encounters.