When Crisis Calls: A Study of Crisis Intervention Trained Officers and Call Outcomes

Abstract

After a high visibility instance of police brutality and a history of unchecked police power, the Department of Justice launched a nine month investigation into the Seattle Police Department. The investigation concluded that officers of the SPD often engaged in patterns of unjustified, excessive force, especially when it came to instances with people in emotional or behavioral crisis, or people under the influence. From this investigation came a federal consent decree forcing the Seattle Police Department to review and update many of their internal policies, procedures, and standards. An output of this was the introduction of a Crisis Intervention Training, which is a method that originated in Memphis and now is available in 2,700 communities across the nation. Crisis Intervention Training (CIT) aims to help officers identify mental health and behavioral crisis situations, and educate them on ways to de-escalate them. Overall, it aims to divert people with mental illness or substance use disorders away from the criminal legal system and into the appropriate services. This paper aims to understand the impact of a CIT officer arrival on call outcomes. It utilizes the most transparent policing database out there: the Seattle Crisis Contact Database. This paper runs several logistic regressions to analyze call difficulty and outcome data, and how it changes when a CIT officer is present on the scene. This paper does not intend to make any causational claims and instead only makes correlational observations. It finds that cases where CIT officers are present have higher likelihoods of both positive and negative outcomes. As call difficulty increases, the likelihood of a positive outcome in cases with CIT officers present decreases. Several suggestions for future research are discussed, as well as policy implications and recommendations. The primary recommendation is to dispatch CIT officers to lower level calls in order to maximize their impact. The second is to update CIT training in order to diversify tactics to better suit call difficulty.