How the police train crisis intervention

Seconds later, voices begin to scream from the room, the door flies open and the scene shows a full-blown shouting match between a man and a woman.

Raquan and I introduce ourselves – between the actors’ swear words – and separate them. I take the wife to the other side of the room while O’Berry stays with the husband near the door to figure out what’s going on. Our job is to break it down, calm them down and solve the problem.

“Kevin isn’t real,” she says. “I’m trying to convince him that Kevin isn’t real. It’s driving me crazy.”

Actors Chris and Keri Benoit are married in real life and are both officers at the Butler County Sheriff’s Office. All volunteer officers have everyday experience with mentally ill people – experience that underpins their considerable acting skills.

As she speaks, I notice a severe wound on her wrist. I’ll go through my questions:

“When was the last time you ate?” When was the last time you slept? Do you take any medications?”

In this scenario, both individuals were transported to the hospital via a “pink slip,” a common cause of such calls and an incident that is becoming increasingly common across the country.

Crisis intervention training at the police academy

On the surface, the crisis intervention curriculum at the Sinclair Police Academy seems pretty simple: use active listening, ask open-ended questions, secure all weapons, and assess the situation.

In reality, the first time you encounter someone with the barrel of a gun in their mouth (even if the gun is blue and obviously fake), all intellectual understanding of the class work is lost.

The Sinclair Police Academy includes 24 hours of crisis intervention training, half of which is classroom time and the other half is practical application.

In other words, 50% of the training is what to do or say when encountering a manic, suicidal, or hallucinating person; and 50% can remember anything when your heart rate is high and your palms are sweaty.

“The first scenario I did…I was extremely nervous,” Cadet Chris Jones said. “I’m like, ‘Okay, here we go, this is supposed to be a real call.’ I couldn’t imagine joining a call for the first time on the go and feeling like I was reading a PowerPoint presentation. That’s it.”

Trainers and volunteer officers from several area departments set up a total of six different scenarios on the second floor of Building 19 in Sinclair: a man alone in his apartment hallucinating his spouse; a young man in the woods with a shotgun in his mouth; a married couple arguing and the wife cutting herself; an elderly gentleman whose water and electricity had just been shut off. Five of these were calls from individual officers, and the couple called two officers to respond.

If a crime has been committed, cadets are taught to first de-escalate and then investigate.

This reporter regrettably committed at least two Fourth Amendment violations – such as entering the “residence” without good reason – within about two minutes of the first scenario. Out of 19 cadets and one reporter, the first attempt at crisis intervention didn’t go particularly well for anyone.

“We’re done, we’re starting to reflect with the instructors and everything, and almost everything we talked about, I’m like, ‘I know that.’ I know how this should have been handled.’ And for some reason I just didn’t do it,” Jones said.

Between scenarios, the classroom is a hive of activity: writing scripts, going over notes, making your own checklists of things to pay attention to. Over time our results improved and by lunch several cadets said they had learned more from practical scenarios in the first four hours than they had learned from notebooks and PowerPoints over the last four days.

“I feel like the high stress that came with it is a good thing because even though it didn’t go well, I know what I didn’t know. I know what I should fix, not just on those calls, but what I could have done better on all the calls down the line,” Jones added.

There are several common ways a mental health call can end. If a crime has been committed, the person may be arrested and taken to prison, where in many cases they will receive mental health treatment.

If no crime has been committed but the person poses “a significant risk” of harm to themselves or others (including the inability to provide for their own basic needs), the person may be “tricked” or involuntarily committed for a mental health assessment Health to determine whether they need to be hospitalized.

Dealing with mentally ill people has become part of everyday life for the police.

Between March 2021 and September 2022, Dayton saw a 73% increase in mental health calls to 911 and a 111% increase in suicide calls, according to the Montgomery County Behavioral Health Task Force.