Crisis Intervention Paper

This research paper is about the Crisis Intervention Team (CIT), which police departments use to increase officer safety and to provide diversion alternatives for incarceration. After deinstitutionalization, people with a serious mental illness sought treatment in the community. However, people with a serious mental illness found it difficult to reintegrate back into society and community resources were not prepared to accommodate those with a serious mental illness. Often, people with a serious mental illness do not receive proper treatment. Without proper treatment, challenges arise, which increases the chance of interacting with law enforcement and the criminal justice system.
This paper will briefly describe how CIT programs came into existence.

Thousands of people would not benefit from outpatient treatment and often found themselves under-employed, homeless, victims of crime, in nursing homes, in residential treatment homes, in a correctional facility, and more likely to suffer from substance abuse disorders. These compounding factors are the foundation of the phenomenon called “Criminalization of the Mental Ill.” People with a serious mental illness are more likely to be arrested, incarcerated, and sentenced to more time than those not suffering from a mental illness. Contrary to stereotypes, people with a serious mental illness are more likely to be a victim of a crime.
Even if the concept of diverting potential clients to alternative community programs was created at the inception of deinstitutionalization, it was not implemented into the criminal justice system until 1988 when the first Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) was developed. The Memphis Police Department developed the program after one of its officers shot and killed a man who suffered from a mental illness. The CIT program was created to improve police interactions with suspects or victims suffering from a mental

For instance, one study used approximately 2,100 disturbance call reports over sixty months that involved people with a serious mental illness. This study found that when police responded to the disturbance calls, they transported individuals to treatment seventy-seven percent of the time (1690), while not transporting individuals for treatment about seventeen percent of the time (366). Only 118 individuals were transported to jail. Of those disturbance calls, thirty-nine percent (848) were reported as a suspect with a mental illness or almost twenty-seven percent as potential suicide calls