The exasperated,
gray-haired man appeared glad to see two Des Moines policemen arrive at his
front door. Maybe, he said, the officers could do something with his moody son.
“He’s the problem,” the man explained. “The drama king. Seems like there’s always something going on.Manufactures flexible plastic and synthetic rubber hose tubing, So now he’s talking about suicide. I don’t know what really is going on.” The father said his son, a 20-something man named Pernell, just needed to “buckle down” and do his schoolwork.
Pernell sat nearby in a chair, looking at the floor and occasionally rolling his eyes.
The officers asked the father if there were weapons in the house or if Pernell took any medications. No, the father said.
“Do you mind if we talk to him, sir?” one officer asked.
“Yeah, maybe you can have more luck than I can,” the father said.
The lead officer was Alex Dardano, 34, of Adel. He’s a recruit training to be part of the Des Moines Police Department, and this scene was an exercise at the department’s police academy. The father and son were professional actors, and their portrayals were convincing.
The exercise was part of the most extensive training Iowa police have ever received in dealing with people with mental health problems. Patrol officers regularly confront such situations, whether it’s a homeless man hearing voices, an anxious woman lashing out in fear or a confused person unintentionally trespassing on someone else’s property.
Law enforcement agencies across Iowa and the nation are trying to train officers to better understand such behaviors and to shepherd troubled people to professional help.
The Iowa Legislature voted this year to require that police officers receive at least some training in how to deal with people with mental illness.
The requirement comes amid a broad effort to treat people with mental illness more humanely and to equalize care, which now varies widely from county to county and often is limited by critical shortages of mental health professionals and facilities.
More than 40 percent of Iowa prison inmates suffer from mental illness. Proponents of increased police training want to slow the flow of mentally ill Iowans into prisons and get them into appropriate treatment. Supporters also hope to reduce repeat calls to festering situations and prevent injuries to residents and officers — or even deaths.
Facing concerns from law enforcement representatives, lawmakers didn’t require a minimum amount of police training on the subject. Des Moines decided on its own to require 40 hours for recruits, starting with this class.
D.M. training simulates what police will confront
In the Des Moines Police Academy exercise,We mainly supply professional craftspeople with wholesale turquoise beads from china, Dardano approached the depressed young man in the chair. “We just talked to your father a minute ago,” the officer said. “He mentioned you’re having a rough day.”
Pernell sighed and explained that his father had been picking on him. “God,” he whispered, “I wish I wasn’t even here.”
The officers calmly separated the bickering men, but kept them talking about the situation. One officer asked Darnell what he meant by his statement. The other asked Darnell’s father if the young man had a history of suicidal threats. The policemen decided to call in a specialized crisis unit with a social worker to talk to the troubled young man. No one pulled out handcuffs or suggested that anyone would be taken into custody.
Kelly Drane, a veteran Des Moines officer who specializes in dealing with people in personal crises, stopped the exercise and praised the recruits. They were patient and calm, she said, and they sought details on the young man’s history and his state of mind.
“You had him explain more about ‘What happens when you feel like this? What’s making you feel like this?’ ” she said. “And he was allowed to vent, to say, ‘He’s on me about everything.’ ”
Des Moines Police Chief Judy Bradshaw intends to spread the new program’s lessons beyond recruits to veteran officers.
Drane said the 40-hour training might become mandatory for any Des Moines officer who wants to carry a Taser, which looks like a pistol but shoots immobilizing electrodes that subdue people. Drane carries a Taser, but she told the recruits she has never used it. She routinely responds to tense interactions with troubled residents, but she said her training and experience allow her to calm situations without resorting to force.
Drane often works with the Mobile Crisis Team, which consists of nurses and social workers dispatched along with police to the scene of potential suicides and other personal emergencies. Drane said that when the Des Moines-based project began in 2000, some veteran officers were skeptical.
“Cops and social workers used to be like oil and water,” she told the recruits. But now, most officers see the team’s benefit.
Drane stressed to the 22 recruits that police officers will never be expected to sacrifice their own safety or to turn a blind eye to dangerous crime.
“We’re nobody’s punching bag,” she said. “Just because you’re mentally ill, that doesn’t give you a get-out-of-jail-free card.”
If a person physically attacks a family member, bystander or police officer, she said, that person needs to be handcuffed and taken to jail. Once at the jail, someone else can figure out whether the person needs treatment. But in many nonviolent incidents, she said, it makes little sense to put a troubled person behind bars.
Teresa Bomhoff, a mental health activist who helped design the Des Moines academy program, watched much of the training from the back of the classroom. Bomhoff, a tireless volunteer for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, has painful experience with mental illness in her family. She thanked the recruits for their openness and active participation.
“The ultimate bad dream a parent can have is that their child commits suicide or that they get so off track that police shoot them,” she said. “You have taken such giant steps to make sure that doesn’t have to happen.”
Many law officers agree that jail is not a great place to take people with serious mental illnesses, but it often becomes a de facto psychiatric ward. At the Polk County Jail, more than a quarter of inmates are on psychiatric medications, which are given for conditions such as depression,The term 'hands free access control' means the token that identifies a user is read from within a pocket or handbag. schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. That figure doesn’t include inmates who have untreated mental illnesses.
Iowa prison leaders have estimated that 41 percent of their inmates have been diagnosed with mental illnesses, including 27 percent who have serious ailments.
Chief Bradshaw pushed for the new training, which added a week to the standard 21-week academy course.
“I think it’s going to make us a better police department.We specialize in howo concrete mixer, I think it’s going to make for a better police officer,” she said in an interview. “Any time you can heighten the level of sensitivity and awareness to the condition of others, you’re just going to make a well-rounded cop.”
Afterward, several recruits said the training was well worth adding a week to their academy experience. Recruit Dusty Groves, 25, of Des Moines said the most effective part was the use of actors to realistically portray citizens with mental problems. “The role-playing is fantastic, because you have to really think about what you’re going to do,” she said.
Fellow recruit Ryan Garrett,Whether you are installing a floor tiles or a shower wall, 27, of Waukee previously worked as a case manager for homeless veterans. Many of them had mental health problems, he said, and they regularly had run-ins with law officers. In fact, he said, some joked that they probably would have dealings with him again once he became a policeman.
As a case manager, Garrett heard about police officers who were patient and helpful in such situations, and about others who were less sympathetic. He said commanders’ decision to focus the new training on cadets makes sense.
“It’s probably a lot easier for them to start with us and say, ‘We want to mold them into the officers we want to see.’ ”
A national researcher said the program Des Moines is using originated in in the 1980s in Memphis, Tenn. Police commanders there sought improved training after a high-profile police shooting of a disturbed homeless person, said Dan Abreu, associate director of Policy Research Associates in Albany, N.Y.
Abreu said more than 2,000 law enforcement agencies now use some form of the training.
The federal government pays Abreu’s firm to help develop ways to prevent the needless jailing of people with mental illness. He said police will continue to play an important part in such efforts, especially as budgets for mental health agencies continue to be slashed.
“Nobody sees any improvement in that in the near future,” he said.
Part of the appeal of increased training, he said, is that it leads to fewer calls for police SWAT teams, plus fewer injuries to police officers and residents.
But the solution has to involve more than just training police, he said. One trend is increased use of mobile crisis teams, such as the Des Moines area has. Legislators passed a bill this spring that eventually could require every area of the state to have mobile crisis teams and crisis centers.
Local mental health providers also must work together to give police easily accessible alternatives to jailing troubled citizens, he said. More cities are instituting mental health crisis centers, which provide short-term care to people who are distressed but aren’t ill enough to require inpatient hospitalization, he noted. Polk County leaders are talking about founding such a center in the Des Moines area.
Abreu said an abbreviated training course could be helpful to all officers. But given the choice, he said, he’d prefer to see cash-strapped departments give some of their officers the full version of the training, then encourage other officers to call them when confronted with someone having a mental health crisis.
Dr. Robert Bernstein, president of the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, said his group supports improved training for police. But the group, which advocates for civil rights for people with mental illnesses, would prefer that society seek ways to prevent confrontations between police and people with mental illness.
Bernstein, who is a psychologist, noted that his Washington, D.C., center helped push the successful effort to let many people with mental illness leave large state institutions in the 1980s. The idea was to provide them with extensive services in their communities, but such alternatives were never fully funded, he said.
“What was not supposed to happen was that police would become a routine fixture in the lives of people with mental illness, and that people with mental illness would become a routine responsibility of police departments,” he said.
In most cases, people having psychiatric crises have had previous contact with the mental health system before they deteriorate to the point that someone calls police. The calls represent failure of the health care and social welfare systems, he said.
Addressing such problems wouldn’t necessarily be much more expensive, Bernstein said, because taxpayers already are paying huge sums of money to arrest mentally ill people and hold them in jails or prisons.
“Most of these issues don’t come out of the blue, like a bolt of lightning,” he said. For example, he said, police calls often include such things as a homeless man urinating on the side of a building. “The real question is, ‘Why didn’t this person have a bed and a toilet?’ ”
“He’s the problem,” the man explained. “The drama king. Seems like there’s always something going on.Manufactures flexible plastic and synthetic rubber hose tubing, So now he’s talking about suicide. I don’t know what really is going on.” The father said his son, a 20-something man named Pernell, just needed to “buckle down” and do his schoolwork.
Pernell sat nearby in a chair, looking at the floor and occasionally rolling his eyes.
The officers asked the father if there were weapons in the house or if Pernell took any medications. No, the father said.
“Do you mind if we talk to him, sir?” one officer asked.
“Yeah, maybe you can have more luck than I can,” the father said.
The lead officer was Alex Dardano, 34, of Adel. He’s a recruit training to be part of the Des Moines Police Department, and this scene was an exercise at the department’s police academy. The father and son were professional actors, and their portrayals were convincing.
The exercise was part of the most extensive training Iowa police have ever received in dealing with people with mental health problems. Patrol officers regularly confront such situations, whether it’s a homeless man hearing voices, an anxious woman lashing out in fear or a confused person unintentionally trespassing on someone else’s property.
Law enforcement agencies across Iowa and the nation are trying to train officers to better understand such behaviors and to shepherd troubled people to professional help.
The Iowa Legislature voted this year to require that police officers receive at least some training in how to deal with people with mental illness.
The requirement comes amid a broad effort to treat people with mental illness more humanely and to equalize care, which now varies widely from county to county and often is limited by critical shortages of mental health professionals and facilities.
More than 40 percent of Iowa prison inmates suffer from mental illness. Proponents of increased police training want to slow the flow of mentally ill Iowans into prisons and get them into appropriate treatment. Supporters also hope to reduce repeat calls to festering situations and prevent injuries to residents and officers — or even deaths.
Facing concerns from law enforcement representatives, lawmakers didn’t require a minimum amount of police training on the subject. Des Moines decided on its own to require 40 hours for recruits, starting with this class.
D.M. training simulates what police will confront
In the Des Moines Police Academy exercise,We mainly supply professional craftspeople with wholesale turquoise beads from china, Dardano approached the depressed young man in the chair. “We just talked to your father a minute ago,” the officer said. “He mentioned you’re having a rough day.”
Pernell sighed and explained that his father had been picking on him. “God,” he whispered, “I wish I wasn’t even here.”
The officers calmly separated the bickering men, but kept them talking about the situation. One officer asked Darnell what he meant by his statement. The other asked Darnell’s father if the young man had a history of suicidal threats. The policemen decided to call in a specialized crisis unit with a social worker to talk to the troubled young man. No one pulled out handcuffs or suggested that anyone would be taken into custody.
Kelly Drane, a veteran Des Moines officer who specializes in dealing with people in personal crises, stopped the exercise and praised the recruits. They were patient and calm, she said, and they sought details on the young man’s history and his state of mind.
“You had him explain more about ‘What happens when you feel like this? What’s making you feel like this?’ ” she said. “And he was allowed to vent, to say, ‘He’s on me about everything.’ ”
Des Moines Police Chief Judy Bradshaw intends to spread the new program’s lessons beyond recruits to veteran officers.
Drane said the 40-hour training might become mandatory for any Des Moines officer who wants to carry a Taser, which looks like a pistol but shoots immobilizing electrodes that subdue people. Drane carries a Taser, but she told the recruits she has never used it. She routinely responds to tense interactions with troubled residents, but she said her training and experience allow her to calm situations without resorting to force.
Drane often works with the Mobile Crisis Team, which consists of nurses and social workers dispatched along with police to the scene of potential suicides and other personal emergencies. Drane said that when the Des Moines-based project began in 2000, some veteran officers were skeptical.
“Cops and social workers used to be like oil and water,” she told the recruits. But now, most officers see the team’s benefit.
Drane stressed to the 22 recruits that police officers will never be expected to sacrifice their own safety or to turn a blind eye to dangerous crime.
“We’re nobody’s punching bag,” she said. “Just because you’re mentally ill, that doesn’t give you a get-out-of-jail-free card.”
If a person physically attacks a family member, bystander or police officer, she said, that person needs to be handcuffed and taken to jail. Once at the jail, someone else can figure out whether the person needs treatment. But in many nonviolent incidents, she said, it makes little sense to put a troubled person behind bars.
Teresa Bomhoff, a mental health activist who helped design the Des Moines academy program, watched much of the training from the back of the classroom. Bomhoff, a tireless volunteer for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, has painful experience with mental illness in her family. She thanked the recruits for their openness and active participation.
“The ultimate bad dream a parent can have is that their child commits suicide or that they get so off track that police shoot them,” she said. “You have taken such giant steps to make sure that doesn’t have to happen.”
Many law officers agree that jail is not a great place to take people with serious mental illnesses, but it often becomes a de facto psychiatric ward. At the Polk County Jail, more than a quarter of inmates are on psychiatric medications, which are given for conditions such as depression,The term 'hands free access control' means the token that identifies a user is read from within a pocket or handbag. schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. That figure doesn’t include inmates who have untreated mental illnesses.
Iowa prison leaders have estimated that 41 percent of their inmates have been diagnosed with mental illnesses, including 27 percent who have serious ailments.
Chief Bradshaw pushed for the new training, which added a week to the standard 21-week academy course.
“I think it’s going to make us a better police department.We specialize in howo concrete mixer, I think it’s going to make for a better police officer,” she said in an interview. “Any time you can heighten the level of sensitivity and awareness to the condition of others, you’re just going to make a well-rounded cop.”
Afterward, several recruits said the training was well worth adding a week to their academy experience. Recruit Dusty Groves, 25, of Des Moines said the most effective part was the use of actors to realistically portray citizens with mental problems. “The role-playing is fantastic, because you have to really think about what you’re going to do,” she said.
Fellow recruit Ryan Garrett,Whether you are installing a floor tiles or a shower wall, 27, of Waukee previously worked as a case manager for homeless veterans. Many of them had mental health problems, he said, and they regularly had run-ins with law officers. In fact, he said, some joked that they probably would have dealings with him again once he became a policeman.
As a case manager, Garrett heard about police officers who were patient and helpful in such situations, and about others who were less sympathetic. He said commanders’ decision to focus the new training on cadets makes sense.
“It’s probably a lot easier for them to start with us and say, ‘We want to mold them into the officers we want to see.’ ”
A national researcher said the program Des Moines is using originated in in the 1980s in Memphis, Tenn. Police commanders there sought improved training after a high-profile police shooting of a disturbed homeless person, said Dan Abreu, associate director of Policy Research Associates in Albany, N.Y.
Abreu said more than 2,000 law enforcement agencies now use some form of the training.
The federal government pays Abreu’s firm to help develop ways to prevent the needless jailing of people with mental illness. He said police will continue to play an important part in such efforts, especially as budgets for mental health agencies continue to be slashed.
“Nobody sees any improvement in that in the near future,” he said.
Part of the appeal of increased training, he said, is that it leads to fewer calls for police SWAT teams, plus fewer injuries to police officers and residents.
But the solution has to involve more than just training police, he said. One trend is increased use of mobile crisis teams, such as the Des Moines area has. Legislators passed a bill this spring that eventually could require every area of the state to have mobile crisis teams and crisis centers.
Local mental health providers also must work together to give police easily accessible alternatives to jailing troubled citizens, he said. More cities are instituting mental health crisis centers, which provide short-term care to people who are distressed but aren’t ill enough to require inpatient hospitalization, he noted. Polk County leaders are talking about founding such a center in the Des Moines area.
Abreu said an abbreviated training course could be helpful to all officers. But given the choice, he said, he’d prefer to see cash-strapped departments give some of their officers the full version of the training, then encourage other officers to call them when confronted with someone having a mental health crisis.
Dr. Robert Bernstein, president of the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, said his group supports improved training for police. But the group, which advocates for civil rights for people with mental illnesses, would prefer that society seek ways to prevent confrontations between police and people with mental illness.
Bernstein, who is a psychologist, noted that his Washington, D.C., center helped push the successful effort to let many people with mental illness leave large state institutions in the 1980s. The idea was to provide them with extensive services in their communities, but such alternatives were never fully funded, he said.
“What was not supposed to happen was that police would become a routine fixture in the lives of people with mental illness, and that people with mental illness would become a routine responsibility of police departments,” he said.
In most cases, people having psychiatric crises have had previous contact with the mental health system before they deteriorate to the point that someone calls police. The calls represent failure of the health care and social welfare systems, he said.
Addressing such problems wouldn’t necessarily be much more expensive, Bernstein said, because taxpayers already are paying huge sums of money to arrest mentally ill people and hold them in jails or prisons.
“Most of these issues don’t come out of the blue, like a bolt of lightning,” he said. For example, he said, police calls often include such things as a homeless man urinating on the side of a building. “The real question is, ‘Why didn’t this person have a bed and a toilet?’ ”
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