The Mobile (AL) Police Department , through federal grants and collaboration with a local behavioral health crisis center, is improving its response to mental health crisis calls by training sworn officers to effectively use mental health intervention and de‐escalation techniques.

The police department’s Office of Strategic Initiatives is working closely with AltaPoint’s Behavioral Health Crisis Center and Dr. Cindy Gipson, who has worked in mental health for more than 30 years. Along the way, she worked with the Williamson County (TX) Sheriff’s Department’s crisis intervention team as a clinical first responder. Now she is associate director of AltaPointe Health Crisis Services and working hand-in-hand with police in Mobile.

“We teach the officers what mental illness looks like and how to manage the call by knowing what to say and what to do,” says Gipson. “Officers learn how to intervene because in some incidents the person may be a danger to themselves or others.”

She explains how when she moved to Mobile, she wanted to get something started to help officers deal with mental health crisis calls. Her organization started a crisis team, and then created a partnership with the Mobile Police Department.

“I think that it's really important to have that relationship where we're both working together to try to get mentally ill people the treatment they need, where they need it,” she says while also pointing out how finding help for some individuals can prevent their landing in jail or leaving families struggling to find resources for a loved one on their own.

Gipson collaborated with MPD Commander Curtis Graves and City of Mobile Public Safety Director Lawrence Battiste, who was police chief at the time, to pursue Bureau of Justice Assistance grants to provide training and resources for officers. They applied for the first grant in 2020, but Gipson said the implementation got off to a slow start due to the pandemic. The City of Mobile received the initial $400,000 grant for a two-year period but was later allowed a one-year extension. The second grant provided $150,000 for training. Funding from that second grant enabled sending a team from Mobile recently to visit the Harris County (TX) Sheriff’s Office, which is known for its Crisis Intervention Response Team ,  for specialized training in dealing with mental health calls.

That larger initial grant was for a continuation of a program that deployed a case manager in the Mobile County Jail for intervention post-incarceration as an effort to reduce recidivism. Gipson said it also really targets linking those individuals who have fallen out and commit crimes of survival back to treatment.  Another component of the first grant was the forensic assertive community treatment team that works with individuals who have a lot of contact with law enforcement and emergency departments and are frequently in and out of the system. That team goes out to wherever they are, helps them find housing, then goes out to their home, and constantly checks to make sure that they're taking their medication and remaining compliant with treatment. The team also works on cognitive behavioral therapy to reduce criminogenic thought process.

The third component of the initial grant was providing basic training to be part of in-service training. A fourth component was the creation of a co-responder model that has been implemented so far in one precinct.

“Clinicians will go out with officers and evaluate people if it comes into dispatch as a mental health call or even if the officer gets on scene, like say for a domestic violence call, and it turns out to be a mentally ill subject,” Gipson says.

“We can't move forward without incorporating training along the lines of mental health into the fabric of what law enforcement does on a day-to-day basis. It's impossible for us not to,” says Graves. “We are dealing with the shutting down of mental health institutions and then people are out on the street and in our jails and, more often than not, officers are engaging someone who is either diagnosed or undiagnosed with a mental health deficit.”

Sharing Information

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) is a federal law that required the creation of national standards to protect sensitive patient health information from being disclosed without the patient’s consent or knowledge. However, HIPPA does allow for the sharing of pertinent information with law enforcement for public safety.

“We are able to talk about history of when there's a call or what our interaction with that individual has been and we're also able to create flags in the CAD system that can help officers in the future,” explains Gipson.  “The overall goal here is both protecting officers and the citizens.”

That means if a rookie officer responds for the first time to a home where other officers have noted a mental health situation, he or she can be alerted in advance and prepare to react accordingly says Gipson.

Public Perceptions

Graves sees furthering officer training on how to deal with mental health calls as something that will show police in a better light.

“We have to improve the perception of how people see law enforcement as well. I think this is one of the things that helps us do that when we are approaching things differently in the correct way, like this, as opposed to responding or reacting to these calls in a way that is counterproductive to the individual and the family,” he says.  “Because officers, we get the brunt of the negative comments of responding to something that everyone later sees as being something that we should have responded to differently. As we move forward trying to improve relationships between law enforcement and the community, this is something that helps us do that so that law enforcement can actually turn the page on how people perceive law enforcement responding to these type calls to something as more productive and, and more beneficial.”