MERIDIAN — When someone in East Mississippi is experiencing a mental health crisis, specially trained law enforcement officers may be called on to de-escalate the situation and connect that person with appropriate help.
The work is part of the East Central Mississippi Crisis Intervention Team, a community-based program that trains law enforcement officers to respond to people experiencing mental health or substance abuse crises.
The need is significant. The National Alliance on Mental Illness estimates more than 487,000 Mississippi adults are living with a serious mental illness, while 31,000 adolescents in the state have serious thoughts of suicide. More than 2.2 million Mississippians also live in communities with a shortage of mental health professionals.
Lauderdale County Sheriff’s Department Lt. Andy “Ski” Matuszewski, program manager for the East Central Mississippi Crisis Intervention Team, said crises can look different from person to person, but the mission is the same: helping others.
Crisis intervention training has its roots in a 1988 incident in Memphis, Tennessee, when a young man experiencing a mental health crisis threatened people with a knife. The situation escalated, and police fatally shot him.
The shooting prompted community discussions about how law enforcement should respond to people experiencing mental health crises. A task force was formed with the help of Meridian native Sam Cochran, then a lieutenant with the Memphis Police Department. The resulting program became the foundation for crisis intervention training programs around the world.
The Lauderdale County Sheriff’s Department began exploring crisis intervention research around 2009 in an effort to reduce the number of people being held in the county jail because of mental health issues.
“Jail is not a place to get well if you’ve got an illness of whatever kind,” Matuszewski said. “We’re limited on treatments that we can apply and afford within the budget that we’re able to operate under.”
The idea quickly grew beyond reducing the jail population. With grant funding, the East Central Mississippi Crisis Intervention Team launched in 2012 and has since trained law enforcement officers throughout Mississippi and beyond.
Some officers trained in Meridian have gone on to establish CIT programs in other parts of the state.
The East Central Mississippi CIT serves a nine-county area and works in partnership with mental health organizations, hospitals, community support groups, law enforcement agencies and others. Representatives from those groups serve on a steering committee that evaluates available resources and identifies gaps where people in crisis could otherwise fall through the cracks.
The 40-hour CIT training is designed to be demanding. It includes instruction from community professionals, people with lived experience involving mental health crises and role-playing exercises in which students must demonstrate their skills.
Matuszewski said the training carries significant responsibility.
Under normal circumstances, an officer generally must witness a crime or obtain a warrant before taking someone into custody. A certified CIT officer, however, may determine that a person experiencing a mental health crisis is a danger to themselves or others or is unable to care for themselves and arrange for them to be taken for an evaluation.
“It’s a huge amount of responsibility,” Matuszewski said. “The certification allows an officer to compel an individual into an evaluation for their mental health or substance abuse, what the status is, without the action of a magistrate, which is the only time in our law that we’re allowed to do that.”
The goal is not to turn police officers into clinicians, he said, but to help them recognize what they are seeing and understand where to direct someone for help.
“We’re not trying to make clinicians out of cops, but they need to understand what they’re looking at so they can know which door to point these people towards,” Matuszewski said.
Recent changes in Mississippi law require law enforcement agencies to have at least one officer certified in crisis intervention. All law enforcement officers also must receive basic mental health first aid training.
The East Central Mississippi Crisis Intervention Team typically offers three training sessions each year, in the spring, summer and fall, giving agencies multiple opportunities to send officers and deputies.
Graduates receive a CIT pin to wear on their uniforms. Matuszewski said people who have experienced mental health challenges have increasingly come to recognize the pin as a sign that an officer has specialized training and can help connect them with resources.
Crisis intervention programs are now active in all 50 states and in several foreign countries, Matuszewski said. The programs continue to evolve as resources and community needs change.
For the officers involved, however, the greatest measure of success sometimes comes years later, when they hear from someone whose life was changed by an encounter during a crisis.
“One of those visits just makes all the difference in the world,” Matuszewski said. “When you can make a difference for somebody, that’s what this is all about.”
