Nearly a year after a police-related shooting death that prompted protests and questions about law enforcement interactions with the mentally ill, advocates and mental health professionals in Milwaukee say the changes that city officials promised haven’t come into fruition as quickly as they would have hoped.
Last December, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett announced plans to expand the city’s crisis intervention training program — a tool that aims to improve police response during mental health emergencies — by making sessions mandatory for officers. Each person who bears a shield will receive 16 instructional hours rather than the 40 required under the old model. In total, the plan would cost the city $1.2 million. Earlier this year, lawmakers added $250,000 for mental health training for correctional and law enforcement officers for the next two years.
Some advocates contend that despite early successes in the pairing of police offices with mental health professionals, county mental health administrators have been sluggish in creating teams equipped to take to the streets in situations similar to that of the late Dontre Hamilton, the man who police shot more than a dozen times during a psychotic episode in a Milwaukee park last April.
“There’s a lot of awareness around the issue. The city’s on edge,” The Reverend Willie Brisco, president of Milwaukee Inner City Congregations Allied for Hope (MICAH), told ThinkProgress. “We’re just waiting to see what happens. The police are trying to get as many people trained as possible to properly interact with those who have mental health issues. I don’t know if you would be able to pair mental health providers with each officer though. This is a problem that’s been around for a long time. I’m not sure if anyone has their finger on what needs to be done,” Brisco said.
MICAH counts among the critics of the work done so far, with some members calling for the expansion of hours for police-mobile mental health team pairings. Right now, such services aren’t available on the weekends, early mornings, and after midnight — times when incidents would likely occur. Reports that crisis intervention training for officers in the Milwaukee Police Department won’t wrap up until 2017 have also drawn the ire of some groups who point to the 30 percent reduction in the people who needed to be hospitalized in recent months as a sign that the program needs more support.
Nearly 10 years ago, Milwaukee implemented crisis intervention training after the shooting death of a schizophrenic man, promising residents that police officers would be better able to decipher a mentally ill person in trouble. The program mirrored similar strategies in Houston and Memphis that have been designated as the gold standard in mediating incidents involving the mentally ill.
Officers in Memphis who trained under local mental health professionals learned how to interact with troubled parties more humanely, eventually maintaining 24 hour, 7 day a week coverage. In Houston, nearly 20 teams of police and mental health care workers are on call at any time. Dispatchers also learn how to decipher whether calls warrant the presence of these teams, such as in the case of a hostage situation. They use the information they gather in tandem with a codebook of mental health calls to keep officers abreast of what they should expect upon arriving on the scene.
While the Houston and Memphis programs have been credited with helping build strong relationships between law enforcement, mental health practitioners, and members of the community, officers in Milwaukee haven’t experienced similar results. Even with the implementation of the crisis intervention training, seven people, including Hamilton, have succumb to a hail of police bullets. In three of those cases, the officers who responded didn’t receive the department’s mental health training. That’s why advocacy groups are clamoring for a speedier expansion of the program.
For some people like Martina Gollin-Graves, however, mandating that every law enforcement official undergoes crisis intervention training may not be the best solution. What Gollin-Graves, President/CEO of Mental Health America of Wisconsin, said she wanted to see instead was a change in the way that officers think about those who suffer from mental illness.
“When you mandate something, not everyone’s going to be on board,” Gollin-Graves told ThinkProgress. “Some of the officers being mandated to take this training don’t buy into this philosophy. People need to have this mindset that those with mental illness have value and they’re not subhuman. We want to go back with the police department and redefine this process where officers really have to show that they want to undergo this training. They wouldn’t issue pins to everyone. Officers have to earn it. When they wear it, that says something to the community,” Gollin-Graves said.
Barbara Beckert, director of the Milwaukee office of Disability Rights Wisconsin, shared Collin Graves’ sentiments, saying that training every officer of the Milwaukee Police Department doesn’t go far enough in expanding access to services that help those with mental illness before disaster strikes.
“Milwaukee’s system has received scrutiny and analysis that has been reported on in a number of years,” Beckert told ThinkProgress, alluding to reports that Hamilton, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, had trouble attaining his medication shortly before his death last April. Last July, Beckert and other members of the Milwaukee Mental Health Task Force compiled a list of recommendations they said would hold law enforcement officials accountable and help the mentally ill better navigate the mental health system.
“While there’s some positive changes that have begun to advance, we’re at the beginning of the process of transitioning to a system that’s preventative instead of reactive when there’s a crisis and relying on services at the deep end of the system. The psych emergency room has a heavy flow of people and that’s an indication that there’s not awareness or services in the community. The only way people see to help is in the emergency room and that’s through law enforcement officers,” Beckert said.
Beckert may have a point. Even with the expansion of coverage for mental health services under the Affordable Care Act, provider shortages in the field make it difficult to get an appointment with psychiatrists, psychologists, and other practitioners. The wall between physical health and mental health also causes issues. Many primary care settings lack behavioral health resources despite the fact that nearly 70 percent of primary care visits stem from mental ailments.
Without proactive care, the mentally ill have few options, one of which is Milwaukee’s psychiatric emergency room, a place that sees more than 13,000 visitors annually, with two-third checking in via emergency detention. This didn’t occur by happenstance. Rules that allow police to bring suspects into emergency detention without oversight has exasperated the situation. Of those who go to these emergency rooms, more than one-third return, some within 90 days of their initial visit. Experts say that bridging the gap in mental health care could better help hospitals monitor potential patients and reduce readmissions, an outcome that Beckert said would prove most effective in preventing future shooting deaths of the mentally ill.
“We need community resource centers,” Beckert added. “These would be places where people suffering from emotional distress and substance abuse and their families could go seek help and they can learn about programs. Certified peer specialists can be there to provide informal support. Benefit specialists can be there to provide support.”