Cape officer helped man who threatened to jump from Emerson Bridge

A Cape Girardeau police officer talked a man out of from jumping off the Bill Emerson Memorial Bridge on Monday afternoon, police said.

Public-information officer Sgt. Rick Schmidt said Tuesday that Patrolman Jake Carter used crisis-intervention team training to defuse the situation.

The Cape Girardeau Police Department has increased the number of officers trained in crisis-intervention training for more than a year. Schmidt said about 40 percent of the officers on patrol now are trained in CIT.

While on patrol, Carter saw the man standing outside the bridge railing, according to a news release issued by the department.

Carter was able to calm the man, who was agitated, according to the statement.

The man eventually was persuaded to come back across the rail and seek medical attention — an outcome Schmidt said indicates the efficacy of CIT training.

“It does work,” he said. “For me, who’s an old hostage-crisis negotiator from back in the mid-’90s, with the utilization of the CIT members, you have so-called negotiators ... [who] know better ways to communicate now than they ever did back when I started in ’93.”

He said the department’s goal is to have every officer trained in CIT eventually. There are 80 commissioned officers in the department.

“I just went through [CIT training] two weeks ago, and a lot of it mirrors the crisis/hostage negotiation that I went through back in the early ’90s,” Schmidt said. “We all communicate every day, but it may not be what you say; it’s how you say it.”

He said having CIT-trained officers gets help to distressed or mentally ill subjects much quicker than having to wait for a specialist.

“Twenty years ago, they’d have called one of the negotiators,” Schmidt said of a situation like the one Monday on the bridge. “They don’t need to do that anymore. Now they can ... pretty much do whatever needs to be done; it worked out really good yesterday.”

Schmidt said no charges were recommended against the man.

“We just want to make sure he gets the help that he needs and somebody really listens to him and go from there,” Schmidt said.

tgraef@semissourian.com

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