Law enforcers learn about mental illness with crisis intervention training

By Jodi Hausen, Chronicle Staff Writer

A man waved a saber sword wildly in the air as his wife screamed obscenities at him. An agitated couple complained about loud music from a "weird" neighbor's apartment.

Meanwhile, a woman said her neighbors had surreptitiously installed cameras in her home and were involved in a pornography ring.

All these fictitious incidents were happening in the sky boxes at Montana State University's Bobcat Stadium Friday and law enforcement officials were there to respond to them.

Though these practice scenarios were nothing new for the 24 law enforcement officers who were handling these situations, they were doing so with a better understanding of mental illness and a new way to deal with it after participating in a weeklong crisis intervention training.

"You can write them as many citations for noise as you want, but you're really here for a mental health issue," said Gallatin County Deputy Don Peterson and a previously-trained CIT participant after officers dealt with one chaotic scene -- a wheelchair-bound drug-abusing mother and her three mentally-ill teen daughters, their two angry neighbors and a very loud boom box.

"Time (spent) now will save you time later," Peterson added.

Before CIT was instituted in the county last year, officers were less familiar with mental illness and more likely to try to resolve an aberrant situation expediently. However, calming down an agitated person with psychological issues takes time and patience, they were taught. And if the officers succeed in calming a person, it often results in fewer arrests overall and a better outcome for the person they are dealing with.

The training "definitely gives you a better understanding and different tools on how to deal with people with mental illness as opposed to feeling like you have to resolve the situation quickly," Bozeman police officer Scott McCormick said. "It slows you down."

That sentiment was repeated by Deputy Doug Lieurance after the sword-swinging man amped-up on cocaine with the screaming wife tried to barricade himself in one room and then locked himself in another. Eventually he, too, was calmed down.

"Time is on your side," Lieurance said. "He hasn't made any aggressive moves."

And though one participant saw his law enforcement training at odds with CIT philosophy in this hostage-rescue scenario, trainers argued that forcibly pulling the wife over a counter would only escalate the scene and could lead to a deadly force situation.

"Don't compromise yourself for Ms. Belligerent here," Lieurance said. "Don't make her problem your problem."

"But there's no right or wrong," Deputy Jim Andrews, who coordinates the training, said. "It's to make you think."

Put on by the Gallatin County Sheriff's Office for officers mostly from Gallatin County, volunteers (like Friday's actors) and assistants came from a variety of local and statewide agencies including Gallatin County Drug and Alcohol Services, Probation and Parole, Court Services,, Attorney's Office and Gallatin Mental Health Center, the Help Center, Bozeman Deaconess Hospital, Spectrum Medical, National Alliance of Mental Illness and Montana State Hospital in Warm Springs.

This is the third CIT session in Gallatin County and the second in as many months due to demand, Andrews said.

"We've kind of rounded a corner" with this third class, Andrews said. "Before we needed to convince officers this is a good thing. But now people are talking about it and they know."

"This group rounds me out," Gallatin County Sheriff's Lt. Jeff Wade, who has been in charge of the training, said. Now about 45 percent of Gallatin County's law enforcement officers are CIT-trained, including at least one from every agency, save for Montana Highway Patrol who don't deal with these issues often.

MSU police officer Thad Winslow said the training was definitely beneficial.

"The biggest thing is just understanding the (mental health) resources that are available and on top of that just getting a better understanding that there's a lot more to why people are doing what they're doing," he said. "They're not just violating the law."