From Deseret News archives:
Police get training in dealing with mentally ill
Police officers responded to a complaint that a neighbor's son had killed the complainant's dog. When police entered the home, they found a mother in a wheelchair who also suffered from a mild mental illness, her son with a moderate mental illness, a daughter with sevedepression who had been sniffing glue and another daughter diagnosed as being both histrionic and hypersexual.
Within minutes after police arrived, yelling ensued from all parts of the house as the siblings argued and taunted each other, and yelled at police and at the neighbor who wouldn't listen to police orders to stay away from the house. All the while, a TV was blasting music videos and the phone wouldn't stop ringing. There was so much noise in the house that the challenge for anyone to think straight, especially officers, seemed daunting.
Even more challenging for officers was to calm everyone down, keep certain people separated and still determine whether a crime had been committed.
In this case, however, the room was filled with silent observers. The officers responding were in training, and the people creating the ruckus were actors. But the scenario was based on a real-life police call.
Last week, the Salt Lake Police Department conducted one of its Crisis Intervention Team training sessions. Between 25 and 35 law enforcers from jurisdictions across Utah attended the weeklong course to learn correct ways for dealing with people suffering from a mental illness.
On Friday, the officers were put through several training scenarios ranging from the odd to the dangerous. All of the scenarios were situations that actually happened, with all but one of the events originally taking place in Salt Lake City.
In one scenario, a man who just found out he was HIV positive went on a cocaine and alcohol binge and later held a machete to his throat.
"I just want to die," the actor told police.
The task for officers was to try to get the man to drop the knife and take him into custody to get professional help, without getting injured themselves. Sometimes a subject's behavior may be strange, but an officer has to decide whether it is criminal. Should the person the officer is dealing with be taken to jail, left alone, or should the officer make an effort to get that person professional help?
In another scenario, Salt Lake police officer Jared Gilbert brilliantly portrayed a man who believed his neighbor in the apartment above him was using an infrared camera to take pictures of him naked and post them on the Internet.
At the end of each scenario, members of the Salt Lake Police Department and Valley Mental Health discuss with the trainees what they did right and what they needed to improve for next time.
