A scared young man, paranoid and hearing voices, is shot and killed by Milwaukee police. His heartbroken family wants to know why police werent better trained to know the symptoms of schizophrenia. The death sparks demands for improvements. Police promise that all officers will be well trained in mental illness. That was 10 years ago. It still hasnt happened. Since that pledge for better training, at least seven people with well-documented and severe mental illness have died after confrontations with Milwaukee police, an investigation by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found. In at least three of the cases, the officers who responded had not received the departments special mental health training, though they were specifically dispatched to deal with a person in an obvious psychiatric crisis. Today, one in five Milwaukee police officers has completed the 40 hours needed to be certified under the Crisis Intervention Team training program, an approach considered the gold standard for policing. Only three of the roughly 40 dispatchers — those who decide which officers to send to particular calls — have been trained in CIT. In the latest case, Dontre Hamilton, an unarmed man with a history of paranoid schizophrenia, was shot 14 times and killed April 30 in Red Arrow Park downtown. Workers at the nearby Starbucks had called police to complain about Hamilton sleeping in the park. A pair of officers checked on Hamilton and found he was doing nothing wrong. When police were called again, an officer — not trained in crisis intervention — awakened Hamilton and started to question him. The officer said he shot Hamilton after Hamilton took his baton and began to beat him. Witness accounts vary on this point. The shooting has sparked ongoing protests calling for reforms, including more mental health training for police. Although an outside investigation has been complete since Aug. 8, Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm has not said if the officer will be charged. Chisholm has said the decision will wait until a report from an outside expert on police use of force is received. In each of the deaths reviewed by the Journal Sentinel, the district attorneys office found officers were acting in the scope of their duties and were cleared of any wrongdoing. It is obvious that the police in this community have not taken mental health illness seriously, Nate Hamilton said. He said he was floored to learn the everyone-trained promise of a decade ago had been broken. Crisis Intervention Team training, sparked by a similar tragedy in Memphis in 1987, is now used in more than 200 cities in the United States and more than 20 countries worldwide. In 2007, Houston police launched a mental health unit, pairing officers with mental health counselors to go out on calls. The program has proved so successful it was expanded to a division last year, and this year officials plan to add three more teams for a total of 13. A contingent of Milwaukee officers went to Houston in 2012 and wrote up a proposal to develop a mental health unit, but none has been formed yet. Officials say they dont have the resources to put every officer through the full CIT course. Weve got so many officers, weve got a lot of demands placed on them, Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn said recently. The 40-hour training for all of them would take a lot of officers off the street for a long time. The state Legislature this year added $250,000 for mental health training for correctional and law enforcement officers over the next two years. As the Journal Sentinel made inquiries for this story, Milwaukee police officials announced that the department will hold 16 hours of mental health training for the roughly 1,450 officers who have not had CIT training. There will also be a refresher class offered to those with CIT training. The department plans to offer two more 40-hour CIT courses, one in October and another in February, said Carianne Yerkes, the inspector who oversees the departments mental health training. Each recruit will now receive the 40 hours of CIT training. We are hearing what the public is saying about the need for us to do more, she said. Steve Moffic, a Milwaukee psychiatrist who worked in Houston for several years, says he is disappointed but not surprised that Milwaukee has not done more to get its officers trained. Cities are like people, he said. They get into habits. Its hard to change. More than 300 people filled the Italian Community Center in August 2004, looking for a better way to get people with severe mental illness into care. Some private hospitals had stopped accepting emergency psychiatric patients and people were waiting more than 24 hours to get in to see a doctor at the countys psychiatric emergency room. Nannette Hegerty, then Milwaukees police chief, promised to work with mental health providers to reduce the backlog. Milwaukee officials brought Sam Cochran, a Memphis police administrator, to Milwaukee to talk about the success of Crisis Intervention Team training. The newly formed Mental Health Task Force promised major reform. The group — which included Hegerty, the police chief, and Mayor Tom Barrett — issued a report titled A Critical Juncture. It promised all officers would be trained in mental health to improve their crisis intervention skills. As proof that important changes were already underway, the report noted: The Milwaukee Police Department agreed to train 1,800 officers in strategies for working with persons with mental illness. The training turned out to be one three-hour class. From 8:15 to 11:15 a.m. By contrast, Crisis Intervention Team training courses are 40 hours long. They include an overview of the symptoms of major mental illnesses, including depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Officers learn about psychiatric medications and their side effects. They are trained in suicide prevention techniques and ways to de-escalate intense situations. They learn about civil rights and commitment laws and what family members go through. Studies on cities with CIT-trained police have shown officers are more confident and capable and do a better job of getting people into care without trauma. The cost of CIT training is offset by a reduction in the number of wrongful death lawsuits, medical bills and jail costs, Cochran said at the time. In 2006, the first full year that the 40-hour CIT course was offered, the department held four sessions. Enthusiasm waned. Now, there is just one a year with a maximum of 40 officers. Flynn frequently exaggerates the number of his officers who are trained, claiming one-fourth have CIT certification. The actual number is 367, one in five, by the Police Departments own accounting. Its frustrating and very disappointing, said Lyn Malofsky, a member of Milwaukees new Mental Health Board, who did much of the training in the early years. State Rep. Sandy Pasch, (D-Shorewood) a psychiatric nurse who also conducted most of the early training, said Hegerty was more committed to training police officers than Flynn is. He gives a lot of lip service to the issue, but the training has dwindled, she said. Until there is more mental health training, deaths like Dontre Hamiltons are bound to be repeated, Nate Hamilton says. Family members say they called police, expecting help in getting their relatives into the hospital, and assumed police were trained to know how to handle people in psychiatric crisis. Flynn, who declined to be interviewed for this story, used a news conference following Hamiltons death to decry as intolerable the increasing numbers of calls his department gets for help with people in psychiatric crisis — now estimated at 26 a day. Milwaukee Countys mental health system has long been crippled by the huge numbers of patients coming through the emergency room door. While the numbers have dropped in the past few years, the ratio of emergency detentions remains one of the highest in the country, with patients returning again and again. Kimberly Walker, chair of the new Milwaukee Mental Health Board, said last week it is critical to get police and mental health administrators to collaborate on reducing the number of patients who return. A new report commissioned by the county shows that 32.5% of patients are returning to the countys psychiatric emergency room within nine months, a higher rate than last year. The Houston model is not flawless. Police there shot and killed a man with mental illness two years ago. But the number of violent episodes has dropped as has the number of people with mental illness who have been forcibly detained. Houston, with more than twice the population of Milwaukee County, has only 28% as many emergency detentions. The sort of cooperation that was envisioned in the 2004 report has not come to pass. Neither Milwaukee police nor officials at the countys mental health division have pressed for substantive collaboration, though a pilot project based on Houstons model has shown tremendous improvement. One Milwaukee police officer is paired with one county mental health counselor. The two call themselves the Crisis Assessment Response Team. They operate out of a building leased by the county at N. 24th and W. Wells streets and are dispatched by Milwaukee police. The two are sent out on calls where the person in psychiatric crisis might be able to be treated without having to be taken to the Mental Health Complex. The goal is to avoid having people detained involuntarily, a costly and cumbersome process. The collaboration has proved to be highly successful. In the first year of the program, the two responded to 249 calls and 40 — or 16% — resulted in an emergency detention, according to statistics provided by the countys Behavioral Health Division. Milwaukee police have been promising to add a second officer for more than a year. Yerkes, the Milwaukee police inspector, said she would welcome a conversation about more coordination between police and mental health professionals. Yerkes said it would be nice to pair more police officers with mental health counselors. It makes sense, she said. So far, it has not been a priority. We havent researched that enough, she said. Were 10 years behind a city like Houston. It took Houston police three years to develop a mental health unit. Ten years after Milwaukee police promised reform, they are still waiting. jsonline/watchdog/watchdogreports/milwaukee-police-promise-on-mental-health-training-unmet-b99347957z1-277344381.html
Posted on: Mon, 29 Sep 2014 02:43:34 +0000
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