The Montgomery County Police Crisis Intervention Team was created 10 years ago to effectively recognize and best communicate with the suicidal, mentally ill and intellectually challenged people they must deal with when responding to calls. The need has proven to be great.
“Last year the police officers in Montgomery County responded to approximately 4,400 calls for mental health for the entire county,” said team coordinator and teacher Officer Scott Davis. “And that’s a lot.”
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Now more than 1,200 officers, social workers and ordinary citizens are certified after 40 hours of training in which they learn how to safely handle incidents with the mentally disturbed.
Davis said calls to police can range from people reporting that they’ve seen spaceships to folks saying there are naked people in the street. Officers are often dispatched with a social worker to the scene, and they sometimes encounter someone who is armed, Davis said.
“It’s a co-dispatch effort,” Davis said. “Two CIT officers must go with [the social worker] to keep them safe. The person might have Alzheimer’s or excited delirium.”
Davis said the Maryland Police Training Commission requires the training for all Maryland officers, which includes Montgomery County’s current 578 officers. But citizen residents can do the training, too, in four 10-hour classes at the Montgomery County Crisis Center in Rockville. The next two sessions start Sept. 19 and Nov. 14.
Davis said he went through the training in 2003, just a year before he started teaching the course. He was an officer for eight years before that throughout the Washington region, including with Amtrak police, the Department of Defense and the Hartford County Sheriff’s Office. Now he mans the Crisis Center.
“Officers are in and out on patrol all the time,” Davis said. “Our team is decentralized, so I’m the one person here during the day.”
