Special Projects
San Francisco Police Crisis Intervention Training
On May 24, 2001, the San Francisco Police Department celebrated the graduation of its first class of 30 officers completing Police Crisis Intervention Training. There have been nineteen classes since that training, the most recent being October 2006. The next training is scheduled for January 2007.
The training was developed by a joint committee of mental health staff, consumers, advocates, and police officers all working together to develop appropriate training for officers to improve the safety and outcomes of their encounters with mentally ill people.
Many of the calls received by the police department involve emotionally disturbed persons. Poverty, homelessness, substance addiction, and mental illness are not in themselves police problems. They are health and economic problems. They have become police problems because of inadequate resources, responses by legislators, community mental health, other government agencies, and society at large.
Starting in the seventies, the number of state psychiatric beds were reduced. New medications helped control some of the symptoms of severe mental illness, giving the hope that a shift of funding from state hospitals to community services would help mentally ill people live in the community as productively as their conditions allowed. Unfortunately, community treatment services were never sufficiently funded. This led to a lack of adequate mental health treatment, housing and support services for the seriously mentally ill.
Until more resources are allocated to community treatment, health care providers and law enforcement will share responsibility for dealing with these problems. This training is an example of that joint effort. It is not designed to make law enforcement officers social workers or diagnosticians, but to give additional tools to use in their jobs.
The goal of the training is to enable law enforcement personnel to deal more effectively with the mentally ill. The course provides training in recognizing signs and symptoms of mental illness, information about available community resources, and specific crisis intervention and de-escalation techniques.
The training is forty hours of four ten-hour consecutive days. Presentations on the first day cover basic areas of mental illness such as schizophrenia, personality disorders, cognitive disorders, suicide by cop, dual diagnosis, and post traumatic stress disorder. Janssen Pharmaceutical provides a Virtual Reality Machine for the first day of the class to give officers a view of what it feels like to hear voices and have hallucinations. On the second day, consumers and family member members will tell their stories and will share lunch with the officers. Afterwards, the officers will visit a number of programs in the community. The third day of training covers children, elderly, mental illness and cultures, suicide intervention, legal issues and developmental disabilities. On the fourth day, active listening, communication techniques and crisis intervention is covered and officers get the opportunity to role play using the information they have learned about mental illness. The training concludes with a recognition ceremony for the officers.
