CIT brings organizations together to help with mental health care

When responding to calls involving someone with a mental health issue, law enforcement officers typically have limited options.

“Right now, the options are leaving them alone, which generally is not a good option; going to our jails, but then we’re criminalizing them; or going to a local emergency room, which is normally not designed for this,” said detective Jason Klaus, a 23-year veteran of the Perry County Sheriff’s Department.

Klaus also coordinates the Missouri Crisis Intervention Team (CIT), a six-year-old partnership of law enforcement agencies, mental health professionals and others focused on providing people with timely and appropriate access to care while diverting them from the criminal justice system.

Cape Girardeau police chief Wes Blair talks about the challenges police face when responding to calls involving people with behavioral health issues Wednesday during the Behavioral Health and Economics Network forum in Cape Girardeau.Jay Wolz ~ Southeast Missourian

Klaus and other representatives of the CIT program were in Cape Girardeau on Wednesday for the 2019 Behavioral Health and Economics Network forum sponsored by the National Council on Behavioral Health and the Missouri Coalition for Behavioral Healthcare. The forum’s focus was the Missouri CIT program and other crisis response initiatives that work together to assist individuals experiencing mental health crises.

The goal of Wednesday’s gathering, Klaus said, was “to promote crisis intervention training and the work that we’re doing in our communities to show the collaboration of not only law enforcement, but also the behavior health community and other community partners that come together to help with mental health crisis response.”

Forum participants included representatives from the Missouri Department of Mental Health; Cape Girardeau’s Community Counseling Center; Bootheel Counseling Services; SEMO Behavioral Healthcare; the Cape Girardeau Police Department; the sheriff’s departments from Cape Girardeau, Perry and Carter counties; and the Missouri State Highway Patrol. Also attending were Missouri Sen. Wayne Wallingford, state Reps. Kathy Swan and Holly Rehder as well as a member of U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt’s staff.

From left, state Sen. Wayne Wallingford, state Rep. Kathy Swan, Lonnie Lusk of the Community Counseling Center and Cape Girardeau police chief Wes Blair speak Wednesday during the Behavioral Health and Economics Network forum in Cape Girardeau.Jay Wolz ~ Southeast Missourian

“This is outside the box of what we thought law enforcement was going to be when we all went through our respective academies and started in our law enforcement careers,” Klaus said. “If you had told me 23 years ago that we’d be talking about and focusing on mental illnesses in our communities, I would have told you you’re crazy and that our job is to investigate and fight crime in our communities. Yet we spend so much time and effort on calls for service for individuals in behavior health crises.”

Cape Girardeau police chief Wes Blair agreed.

“We had absolutely no training (on mental health response),” he told the group. “As a young 24- or 25-year-old officer, when I went out to deal with people with mental health issues, unless they clearly said, ‘I want to kill myself’ or ‘I want to kill somebody else,’ there was absolutely nothing I could do with them other than look on their refrigerator to try to find a family member I could dump them off on, which really wasn’t getting them much help at all.”

CIT is working to develop training programs and referral networks.

“It comes down to how we can get the best treatment as quickly as possible for the individuals we’re working with,” Klaus said. “We want to make sure we’re diverting them from our criminal justice system into appropriate treatment centers.”

Ideally, Klaus said, CIT would like to work with community mental health liaisons and other behavioral health professionals to create mental health “triage centers” available 24/7 to take mental health case referrals from law enforcement agencies.

In addition to being a statewide organization, CIT includes several regional councils throughout Missouri.

“There are 33 local councils in the state and we’re not done growing yet; there are still areas for us to expand,” he said, noting the local council covers five counties — Cape Girardeau, Bollinger, Perry, Ste. Genevieve and Madison.

“We have great participation from Perryville and Cape Girardeau, but there are barriers with Bollinger and Madison due to lack of manpower,” Klaus said. “CIT training involves a 40-hour class, which can be a burden.”

According to the Missouri Coalition for Community Behavioral Healthcare, community mental health liaisons received more than 13,000 referrals from law enforcement and judicial agencies in 2018, with 75% of those referrals coming from local police departments. The Cape Girardeau Police Department averages one or two mental health related calls per day. Roughly half of those qualify for mental health treatment referrals.

“We made 199 (referrals) in 2017 and 148 in 2018,” said Cape Girardeau assistant chief of police Rodney Barker. “We’re on pace this year to be around 148 again this year. Those are just ones our officers felt could benefit from a referral to some agency.”

Additional information about the CIT program is available online at missouricit.org.

“Through that website, you can access a map and click on your county, which will direct you to the local CIT council’s page,” Klaus said. “I cannot be more proud of the work we’ve done here and the council we’ve built in Southeast Missouri. I think it’s the standard.”

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