Seattle police: what they're doing right with troubled people
Appropriate tactics with mentally ill people increase police officers' satisfaction with their work, steer the sick to needed care, save time and money, and boost citizen faith in the force. Training works, but police also need to have other kinds of public support in place.
Good teachers get demoralized by constant public complaints about incompetent teaching, and good police officers in Seattle are feeling hammered by reports about excessive use of force in the SPD. The recent review by the Department of Justice was scathing, and media stories have been caustic.
There's been questioning, as in this article in The Seattle Times, of the handling of people behaving erratically by Seattle police, who have long been regarded as leaders in appropriate treatment of people dealing with mental or chemical disorders.
Excessive use of force can never be righted by reminders that Seattle Police Department (SPD) officers do courageous, unsung good work in a dangerous world. But it still seems fair to note that the rate of complaints in Seattle in 2010 about undue police aggressiveness was one-third lower than the average rate in other major U.S. metropolitan areas. This statistic and others in a recent SPD report may help explain why not everyone shares the negative perspective on the department now dominating the media.
For many people concerned about police responses to the mentally ill, it is encouraging that hundreds of officers in Seattle and King County have taken extended training in how to use noncombative intervention tactics with nonviolent persons who are in trouble (or causing it) due to psychiatric or drug-related problems.
The improved tactics are all the more necessary when holes in the social safety net have turned law enforcement sectors into society’s de facto caretakers for more and more people suffering from such illnesses. Since the 1960s, many state and county psychiatric hospitals have been shuttered, new legal restrictions on involuntary commitment have appeared on the books, and funding for community mental health programs has tanked. This means more police encounters with sick people on the streets
If the number of encounters has risen, one thing hasn't changed, said Sgt. Joe Fountain, who heads SPD's Crisis Intervention Team and teaches crisis intervention strategies to Seattle's officers. “Police have always been on the front edge of the social safety net," Fountain said. "It’s always been an officer forcing the door to find the person in the bathtub with wrists slit or the guy who hasn’t eaten in three days beating on the neighbor’s wall.” In such cases, law enforcement officers have traditionally been expected to make the first judgment call.
What has changed over the past couple of decades are ideas about what defines a good judgment call. In situations where a person experiencing a psychological meltdown is creating a disturbance but not committing a serious crime, crisis intervention tactics have proven across the country to be the most effective options.
An 11-hour standoff in 1997 with a man wielding a sword in downtown Seattle was one incident among several that prompted SPD to improve its protocols for encounters with people in crisis. A man with paranoid schizophrenia who was released after 10 years at Western State, into a world devoid of care or housing for him, paced the corner of Second and Pike downtown for hours, brandishing a sword and refusing to put it down. Police finally had to pin the man against a wall with a fire hose and hold him there with a ladder to disarm him.
SPD asked other cities what they were doing in such cases, and in 1998 the department held the first in a new series of classes for police in how to handle incidents involving disruptive people probably experiencing a psychiatric crisis. The training went beyond models common from the '60s to the late '80s, when the belief was that bias and ignorance were what compromised police responses to mentally ill people. “First-generation” efforts simply to destigmatize mental illnesses and teach officers about them had little effect on police performance, says research published in 2002 by the Los Angeles Police Department. Seattle’s version of Crisis Intervention Training (CIT) drew on second-generation models based on the “Memphis Plan,” launched in that city in 1988.
Crisis intervention training in Seattle
CIT combines educational and anti-stigma instruction with various techniques for interaction including verbal de-escalation skills learned through role-playing. Officers trained in CIT know how to cool down potentially hot encounters with a person whose mind is unbalanced, said Fountain. They also use knowledge based on previous calls about a particular person to anticipate his or her probable health needs before a case gets to the point “where the only thing possible is use of force or barricading, like with the sword man downtown."
Trainees also learn different techniques to deal with the major mental disorders — schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and clinical depression — but the goal is not to turn police into shrinks in blue. They learn to focus on a person’s behavior when responding to any problem, Fountain said. “The mistake a lot of people make is in thinking that diagnosis is what we’re concerned with. It isn't. Someone running down the street with no clothes on, we wouldn’t treat any differently whether mentally ill or not. The person is in crisis.”
So CIT is also “knowing about resources available, knowing how the mental health care system works, knowing about mental health court, 72-hour holds, case management, competency, and the web of support” that the person in trouble might have access to, said Fountain. “It takes a 40-hour training to get officers to where they can use that knowledge in problem-solving out on the street.”
About 400 SPD officers have taken the 40-hour CIT course, including 273 who are assigned to patrols, or more than one-third of the patrol force, said Fountain. The total is “easily one of the highest in the country, if not the highest,” he said. Still, that amounts to only about 30 percent of the department’s 1,300 sworn officers.
So, SPD is moving to extend and improve training in de-escalation and communication strategies, in response to recommendations about use of force made last year by the department’s Office of Professional Accountability (OPA). For example, according to an OPA document, 75 officers took a day-long course in "verbal judo," communication tactics aimed at eliciting willing compliance from civilians.
The intensity and physicality of an officer’s demands on another person to behave in a certain way have traditionally escalated according to the rising pattern "Ask-Tell-Make." Verbal judo focuses on persuasion by means of the series "Ask-Explain-Present Options-Confirm Choices-Act." Appropriate use of force is “an option when verbal skills alone will not accomplish a lawful outcome,” says the OPA document. And of course strategies practiced and role-played in classrooms don’t neatly translate to practice on the streets, where officers or civilians can get hurt or killed.
SPD also noted a real need for more training in light of a concern about Washington state’s Basic Law Enforcement Academy (BLEA) for police recruits, which does not teach CIT: “the overall message at the BLEA emphasizes physical defense strategies over verbal de-escalation options.” The emphasis is particularly consequential for Seattle at a time when baby-boomer retirements and other factors have left SPD with one-third of its members having three years or less in post-Academy experience (according to remarks last February from OPA Auditor Anne Levinson at a Crosscut meeting). Recent Academy graduates should get in-service CIT training.
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Comments:
Posted Thu, Jan 12, 7:23 a.m. Inappropriate
Excellent article. Pretty clearly, the Law Enforcement Academy ought to teach law enforcement officers how to deal with people with disabilities.
Posted Thu, Jan 12, 10:19 a.m. Inappropriate
CIT, the intensive 40-hour training described in this article, isn't specifically part of the BLEA (Basic Law Enforcement Academy) curriculum, but recruits are taught communication and de-escalation strategies, and every police academy today includes instruction in responding to disabled populations, if only because of the Americans with Disabilities Act. SPD's mention of BLEA in its response to OPA recommendations last year raised a question not of curriculum content but of emphasis. Clearly, SPD is building on realizations today that providing information about particular groups doesn't do much to change attitudes or behavior toward individuals belonging to them. The department appears to be acting on the admirable conviction that its officers should have opportunities to bring their practice to higher levels while they're on the job and working with the public.
Posted Thu, Jan 12, 11:33 a.m. Inappropriate
Dorothy L. Lengyel, Executive Director of University Heights Center, sent this email:
I am writing to commend you on your recent article in Crosscut. It captures the feelings of many of us that do not believe SPD officers desire to use force or are overwhelmingly flawed as a group of professionals. They are often confronting dangerous situations. They need and deserve more technical support from appropriate health and human service agencies in the field. Training must be also be available if we are to see growth in understanding and de-escalation responses from our SPD. You described these issues in an objective manner and the public should hear more of this perspective.
University Heights is centered in a longstanding crime hot spot. We are working with other District groups to address public safety challenges in partnership with SPD and other County and State agencies. In a brief time there have been small but significant achievements and we are committed to work with SPD long into the future.
What University Heights continues to worry about is the number of officers available to take on the longstanding and difficult street scene. It strikes me as unfair to expect SPD to do more with fewer officers. We hope the DOJ study results will lead to Seattle gaining more resources for officer training, more technical support from the appropriate mental health and drug intervention agencies, and more cops for the community given the number of officers that are retiring and the long process to train and hire new officers.
We have spent enough time talking about what is not working. More energy needs to be directed to the successes you described and to the development of additional public safety tools.
Thanks so much for your article.
Dorothy L. Lengyel
Executive Director
University Heights
5031 University Way NE
Seattle WA 98105
Posted Thu, Jan 12, 2:10 p.m. Inappropriate
Sue Lockett-John in Seattle sent this email:
Congratulations on another thoughtful, well-researched article that looks beyond easy answers to the mental health challenges facing our community. It's obvious that you invested a great deal of time and effort in researching today's article on SPD and county police efforts to engage responsibly and compassionately with people in psychiatric crisis. As a citizen, I found it helpful to learn what our law enforcement agencies and officers are doing right, as well as wrong. I also learned a great deal about the history of CIT and the C-I-Team, and was very disappointed to learn that CIT is not provided as part of basic training at the academy. I wonder whether the small percentage of officers cited by the DOJ report as being responsible for most of the harsh tactics are among the 2/3 who have not received CIT training.
My thanks to you and to Crosscut for spending the time and resources to delve into this topic.
Posted Fri, Jan 13, 9:52 a.m. Inappropriate
I agree with the previous comments, a very well-done article. I was wondering if you ran across any role for assisted outpatient treatment as a way of trying to get persons to take their medication? I know there is a controversy around the idea of forced medication, but also some potential benefits. Are the police in Seattle or King County involved with that at all? Thanks.
Gary Cordner
Kutztown University (PA)
Posted Fri, Jan 13, 4:26 p.m. Inappropriate
@ gcordner: Staying on meds is hard even for "sane" people. We've all had the experience of not completing a full course of antibiotics when symptoms subside, and my friend with diabetes every once in a while can't help playing "chicken" and not injecting her insulin. Why keep putting powerful chemicals into your body when your body is saying you don't really need them?
Except for certain inpatients of mental hospitals, people can't legally be forced to take medications (you seem already aware of that). As I wrote in a story about "The Soloist" a couple years back (http://crosscut.com/2009/05/12/social-services/18999/-The-Soloist-:-an-extraordinary-duet/), and based on my contacts with individuals on regimens of antipsychotic drugs (http://freestylevolunteer.wordpress.com/about/), what keeps people doing meds when the prescriptions are really necessary are relationships with people who care about their well-being and who regularly spend personal time with them. As you can imagine, people without family, friends, or other significant others in their lives have a very hard time continuing to take medications.
Posted Fri, Jan 13, 9:49 p.m. Inappropriate
Judy Lightfoot did a fine job in digesting a lot of nuanced information and accurately reporting on an issue that gets little attention. I rarely comment on articles written by anyone, but I must say that I appreciate journalism that quotes me accurately and doesn't use my words to communicate a message that is different than I intended. It is heartening to see such journalism.
Posted Sat, Jan 14, 6:33 a.m. Inappropriate
Thanks for the reply, Judy. I am aware of some instances around the country of court-ordered medication taking by those in the community, and sometimes it has been suggested that police should/could play a role in enforcing those court orders. From the police angle, I'm sure they would prefer to have nothing to do with it, but we do have a tendency to turn to the police when we want something done that might require coercion. The specialist officers/units you described in the article would probably be the ones asked to do it, and they also might be the ones most likely to develop the kind of trusting relationships you mention in your response. I'm not advocating this approach, just curious to see where it's being used or discussed.
Posted Sat, Jan 14, 9:45 a.m. Inappropriate
I wasn't aware of this concept, gcordner - thank you for drawing it to my attention. When I Googled the topic, the most numerous links were to patient rights advocates arguing against the idea. Here's an article from about 10 years back, explaining the issue - http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2001-02-12-mental-health.htm. Perhaps another reader knows of a more recent one. In the story above, Justin Dawson's occasional calls to the woman with PTSD come closest to what you're talking about. With SPD officer numbers so low, adding this duty to their other responsibilities would be unreasonable (as you seem to suggest) and both MCT and C-I-Team staff are too small at this point to take it on, even if people in the mental health care system in the region believed it was a good idea. Can coercion really work?
I still think many problems could be solved if individuals living with mental illness weren't ostracized by their fearful neighbors and left in shame and loneliness. We all take meds, just for different things, should be the prevailing attitude. Some people do well without meds, too, with the help of professional counseling and solid social support. In either case, isolation is a big problem. It may be *the* problem of our time.
Posted Sat, Jan 14, 6:52 p.m. Inappropriate
Thanks again for your responses. There are quite a few links at this site, http://mentalillnesspolicy.org/ to what they call AOT as well as many other policy and practice issues. I think they are AOT advocates so patient rights advocates might not agree with them. But as far as I know their aims and intentions are on behalf of patients too.
I wrote a guidebook for police about 5 years ago. Not a CIT or tactical guide, but more from a community policing and problem solving perspective. In case it might be of interest to anybody, it's at: http://www.popcenter.org/problems/mental_illness/
Posted Sun, Jan 15, 9:02 p.m. Inappropriate
Judy, I remain quite cyncial in regard to the ability to trust the SPD to "do the right thing", particularly when it comes minority individuals who are mentally ill. Many officers typecast them as "trouble" rather than figuring out it could be mental illness.
And regardless of one heartening part of the SPD training program, the fact that several officers have had serious encounters with otherwise-innocent civilians has left people on the street very cautious. While I agree that it is a disserivce to all those in the SPD who are dedicated officers, the bad actors (such as the officer who was assaulting his girlfriend in a drunken rage in Leavenworth last Fall and is now on "other assignments") leaves a bad taste in one's mouth.
But thank you for giving us this glimpse into the possiblities between the police and the mentally ill.
Posted Fri, Jan 20, 7:07 p.m. Inappropriate
It is discouraging that funding for CIT has dropped so precipitously across the state. Thanks for wading through the details of the programs and explaining the situation. I suppose the idea was that the federal Mental health Transformation Grant would support pilot projects with the idea that good ideas would then be funded by the state.
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