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Date: 6/21/2021
EASTHAMPTON – Several officers from the Easthampton Police Department (EPD) have completed a 40-hour Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) training to improve response to community members suffering from mental illness.
The training, which is offered by the Behavioral Health Network in Springfield, is a part of the pledge EPD Chief Robert Alberti took to join the One Mind Campaign initiated by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, which is a 30,000-member professional association for law enforcement that provides training, technical assistance and recruitment services.
EPD Lt. Dennis Scribner told Reminder Publishing that the EPD must have a certain percentage of officers complete CIT training. The Behavioral Health Network offers two weeks of training for EPD officers, and Scribner said that the department was able to send an additional six officers between the two weeks.
“They have a pretty extensive presentation that they do,” said Scribner. “The training covers a variety of populations – everything from interactions with autistic people, to veterans, to people with substance use disorders.”
According to Scribner, every officer and dispatcher within the EPD has completed mental health first aid training, which is not as extensive as the 40-hour CIT training. As of press time, around 30 percent of officers in the department have completed the CIT training.
“I have officers on a waiting list that have expressed interest in going,” Scribner added.
One of the requirements of completing the One Mind Campaign pledge was implementing a policy within the department involving interactions with people experiencing mental illness. On their website, the EPD has a policy named the “One Mind” policy. Part of the policy involves working with local mental health organizations and protecting mentally ill patients from harm. The department is also asked to refer mentally ill patients to agencies that can provide appropriate services.
“It’s given us a tremendous ability to be able to understand what people are experiencing,” said Scribner. “The majority of officers that have gone through the CIT in particular have been on the patrol force, but this last group, we were able to have a couple of our detectives attend, as well.”
The EPD is currently in the planning stages of partnering with Clinical & Support Options (CSO) and the Hadley Police Department to have a regional co-response team where clinicians will be able to ride with officers for mental health calls. “We have meetings set up between our planning team and the planning team from Hadley police, along with CSO personnel,” said Scribner, who added that they are all planning a Memorandum of Understanding that will detail what the program looks like.
CSO is assisting with a similar initiative in Franklin County, specifically in Greenfield, Deerfield and Montague.
Jennifer LaRoche, vice president of acute and day programs at CSO, told Reminder Publishing that CSO’s emergency service program in Florence has had a good working relationship with EPD, but the idea of embedding a dedicated clinician within the department began about a few weeks ago.
“What we’ve learned in the other places we’re doing this is that having a dedicated clinician allows for many things,” said LaRoche. “It allows us to interact with individuals in the community before they potentially are in crisis, and we’re able to divert them from the emergency room.”
From a police perspective, LaRoche said that this initiative would allow the Police Departments to focus on situations that require more of a police management than a crisis mental health substance use management.
“What we’re learning in Greenfield is there’s a lot of room for education,” said LaRoche. “The police are the first to tell us that this is not their area of expertise.”
According to LaRoche, the details of the program are still very much up in the air, especially when it comes to how many clinicians will be involved. Right now, LaRoche is working with both police departments to see how many calls they get about mental illness. She is also working with both chiefs from the departments to determine what will make sense for the communities.
“It’s really data driven,” said LaRoche. “The details around numbers of clinicians is too early to tell.”