Police Officers’ Attitudes Toward Mental Health and Crisis Intervention: Understanding Preparedness to Respond to Community Members in Crisis

The lack of robust mental health programs throughout the USA has resulted in police frequently being responsible for responding to calls about people with mental illness who are in crisis. Working with people with mental illness as offenders or as individuals needing emergency assistance is a regular part of the job for many in law enforcement, yet specialized training is not a regular part of most academy or in-service training curricula. Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) programs consist of a 40-h training for police and mental health personnel. The programs teach officers about mental illness, its causes and symptoms, and focuses on de-escalation tactics and use of available community resources as alternatives to criminal justice outcomes for calls. The current study explores officers’ feelings of preparedness to work with community members with mental illness and their levels of endorsement of mental health stigma. Researchers surveyed police from nine different local departments in southern New Jersey. Half of the surveyed officers completed CIT training, allowing for comparisons between officers who were trained and those who were not. Results indicate that the CIT-trained officers were more likely to endorse different types of mental health stigma than non-trained officers, but those who were CIT-trained reported feeling better prepared for calls involving people with mental illness.