"Do as we say, not as we do."

Street Sense, a Web site which focuses on the poor and homeless living in Washington, D.C. published this article on the status of the proposed crisis intervention team in that city's police department.

Community members have proposed it, but the local government has failed to take action.


(excerpt)


"Being the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C. should be a leader in protecting our most vulnerable citizens – those living with mental illness,” said Michael Fitzpatrick, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

“Until we have adequate mental health care in this country, people living with severe mental illness will continue to populate our nation’s jails unless we train police officers to recognize the signs of mental illness.”


Philip Eure, who is the executive director of the Office of Police Complaints, said that he had learned about a similar program being used by Memphis Police Department and researched it before sending a proposal to the local government in 2006.

He discovered that officers working for departments utilizing the program embraced it.


The program will require training for officers but no increase in hiring,” Eure said. “And in other cities and counties, it has really resulted in an elite core of officers. They are very proud of it, they are recognized for it, they apply specifically to be part of it. The idea really generates the best possible officers.”


You can find out more about the Office of Police Complaints proposal for a crisis intervention team here. It includes an analysis of three different models of addressing mental health intervention, focusing on the crisis intervention team model.

This model which is used in many medium and large-sized cities involves the intensive training of police officers about mental illnesses, medical conditions, medications and treatments as well as assessing situations and how to address them.

(excerpt)


"The essential difference between suspect encounter training that officers traditionally receive and how to approach the mentally ill is the need to be non-confrontational. Such a requirement ...is diametrically opposed to the way officers are routinely expected to control conflict.

The same command techniques that are employed to take a criminal suspect into custody can only serve to escalate a contact with the mentally ill into violence."


Major points included in the D.C. report were the following.

Officers are screened to participate in the CIT training through evaluations of their maturity, experience, personality traits, communication skills and disciplinary records. They are then sent to complete 40 ours of training and commit themselves to 16 hours annually.

Non-CIT trained officers receive between 8-16 hours of mental health training that is used to assist or back up CIT officers.

Dispatchers are also trained to assess and handle calls for assistance regarding mentally ill people.

The city of Riverside is developing mental health training for its police department's officers and what it's come up with so far was presented in a power point presentation by Asst. City Manager Tom DeSantis at a recent public safety committee meeting. DeSantis described what is known as the "co-partner" model that is utilized by cities like Los Angeles, and counties like San Diego.

It was a sharp deviation from information that had been released previously from the Riverside Police Department which described an approach to the issue that was more akin to the crisis intervention team model. According to one department representative, training was to begin last autumn with the first team of police officers by an organization in Ohio.

But those early efforts did not bear fruit and after the staffing changes imposed by Chief Russ Leach last summer, the process stumbled and stalled for several months before it reemerged in January in a completely different if not fully realized format.

Actually, it wasn't much of a format, more like promises made by De Santis that meetings would be held between police department representatives and county officials including those who worked in the field of mental health. Whether those meetings took place and whether or not they bore fruit, is not known to the public.

Still, it was interesting to hear De Santis talk about how necessary it was for the city's police department to adopt something to adequately address the issue of police officers interfacing with the mentally ill after months of silence on that front.

But 2005 and 2006 saw the officer-involved deaths of two mentally incapacitated, unarmed men.

Terry Rabb, a Black man who was diabetic died in October 2006 after two police officers restrained him while he was suffering from severe hypoglycemic shock. Rabb's face had been pressed into the cushions of a sofa as Officer Camillo Bonome leaned on his back to attempt a carotid restraint. After Bonome was unable to do so, he and Officer John Garcia handcuffed Rabb and sat him down in front of the couch. Soon after, Rabb stopped breathing, suffered cardiac arrest and died at a local hospital.

One of Rabb's friends who had called 9-11 for help said that Bonome had made comments that Rabb appeared to be under the influence of an illegal drug, either PCP or cocaine. Although toxicology tests were conducted, neither substance was found in his body.

Lee Deante Brown who was paranoid schizophrenic died from two gunshot wounds last April after Officer Terry Ellefson had discharged his weapon after Brown had allegedly grabbed hold of his taser, had stood up and lunged at the officer.


Conflicting accounts of the last few seconds of Brown's conscious life among the involved police officers and civilian witnesses make it difficult to be sure what exactly happened, but the issue of mental illness intervention training was raised within days of Brown's death even by the police chief.

Three law suits in both federal and state court resulted from these two incidents. They join three other law suits filed in connection with three other fatal officer-involved shootings during the past 18 months.

Not all incidents involving the mentally ill and police officers have been fatal. One recent incident involving a Casa Blanca mentally ill and mentally challenged man was expected to begin trial in Riverside County Superior Court this week.


"He was acting bizarre."

RPD officer, Jeffrey Barney, testifying at a motion hearing on a P.C. 148(a) case.



This man, a Latino about 40 years of age, had been walking through a park when he was approached and stopped by two police officers. The involved officers testified at a motion hearing several weeks ago, that they had stopped him because he was male and Latino and they were looking for male and Latino suspects for a murder investigation, then he looked angry, then he stared at them, then he looked like he was under the influence of a controlled substance, then he acted angrily and according to the officers, clenched his fists. One officer swung and hit him in the cheek, knocking him down.

He was arrested on felony resistance with force(P.C. 69), but the Riverside County District Attorney's office waited six weeks to file a reduced misdemeanor charge of obstructing and deterring a police officer(P.C. 148(a)).

Because the accounts of that incident potentially will conflict, the audio recorders carried by both police officers could have shed light on the issue. Unfortunately, though the officers were required to turn them on because they initiated the contact, they weren't actually activated until after the incident was over.

When one officer was asked by the defense attorney, himself a former police officer with Santa Ana Police Department, if he had stopped the individual on a hunch, he said yes.

What was interesting about the testimony of both officers, is that it was only at the end of the report and the testimony that the officers conceded that the man could have been suffering from a "mental disorder". But it was the last thing on their minds to be considered, even though it was the problem experienced by the individual. They were running through their minds all the ways that he could have been a criminal profile, rather than allowing consideration that there are other causes for behaviors shown. And they were doing that because that is what they were trained to do.


The creation of crisis mental health training would and has lessened injuries suffered by civilians and police officers and has lessened the commitment of mentally ill individuals to institutions. Riverside would gain much by joining other cities in this country in implementing a good program.


What appears clear is that despite all the progress that the police department has made in recent years, that it's still not ready, emotionally or otherwise, to handle the crisis intervention team model, which is probably the more successful of the two most prominent types of mental health intervention programs used. Hopefully, Riverside will not be the last city in the country that is able to change.

In most of the other departments which utilized the crisis intervention team model, initial resistance by police officers later changed to pride in terms of being chosen to participate in crisis intervention training and utilize it in the field. But first you have to get to that point and Riverside clearly has a ways to go.





"Do as we say, not as we do," was the message sent by three city council members at a meeting at City Hall this morning to those who attended.

A true mental exercise took place when the governmental committee met to "evaluate" the code of conduct in light of the recent incidents that have taken place at city council meetings. But naturally what continued to remain unaddressed were the behaviors shown by city councilmen in recent weeks. No discussions about how often they have interrupted, or called people down to speak with them then ordering the police to escort them out when they didn't like the answers they received to questions they had asked.

Instead, Councilmen Frank Schiavone and especially Dom Betro were unwilling to concede that city council members were exhibiting any bad behavior at all and as Betro said, since they were a governmental body conducting the business of government, it was all about laying the law down(this time without police officers present) that it was the city residents who had to be told what to do.

In fact, one of the ideas of the committee was to do outreach to teach the ignorant masses in Riverside about the code of conduct rules. How about teaching incoming city council members and current ones as well, some etiquette lessons as well, so they would be less likely to interrupt community members during their speeches or to bark, "out of order" whenever they don't like what someone is saying about them?

Councilman Ed Adkison took a bit of a different approach in terms of wanting to dialogue one-on-one with people who had disagreements with the city council, but he's a bit of a lame duck with his replacement only months away from taking office. Still, it was better than what was offered up by the other two councilmen.

The councilmen ultimately rejected both the mayor's proposal and Schiavone's last minute document to "codify" free speech, opting instead to do what it's been doing, at least until Schiavone's proposal to move meetings back to the daytime comes up on a future agenda.

Yes, it's true, Schiavone did propose that three city council meetings be held during the mornings and afternoons during each month and that there be an "optional" fourth meeting held at night. Some suspect that this move if approved would be as much about facilitating the social lives of the elected officials as much or more than discouraging public participation. Just like the antsy behavior at city council meetings has as much to do with the eagerness of city council members to go out and socialize at local businesses and bars as with trying to get the city's business done in an expedient fashion.

At least they are shopping and drinking Riverside.

The vast majority of speakers at the meeting said that there needed to be some guidelines and enforcement of how the city council should behave itself, with several saying that its members even have intimidated the presiding officer, Mayor Ron Loveridge with their antics. The only two who spoke in favor were two men belonging to the Downtown Area Neighborhood Association personally invited by Betro to speak on his behalf at the meeting and they both did a very good job.

Even though Loveridge proposed a plan to the governmental affairs committee where the city council would have people fill out cards rather than stand in line to speak and public comment for non-agenda items would take place at the end of the meeting, he seemed reluctant to impose restrictions on the content of what people were saying during public comment, opting instead to look at behavior.

"Conduct, not content," Loveridge repeated like a mantra.

Loveridge also said that public comment took attention away from the most important part of the agenda, which is the discussion calendar. However, in recent months, the discussion calendar has gotten much smaller and the majority of items placed on it are reports which because their passage doesn't involve the allocation of money or changes in policies and procedures, do not elicit much discussion.

Loveridge called city council meetings, where "the city's business is conducted".

"It's not town hall," Loveridge said.

Resident Yolanda Garland who has barely gotten a word out in recent city council meetings without having one councilman or another tell her she's "out of order", said that it didn't matter what restrictions the city council placed on the city's residents to keep them from speaking out. It didn't matter how many people the city council discouraged through sending intimidating letters to them, or even how many people were arrested.

"Always there will be people to take their places," Garland said.

Nothing will be going back to the full city council, but if the city council works itself up again at future meetings, it will probably decide it's time to send it back to the governmental affairs committee for another review. And so on.