On the Job 

When the same seven citizens were repeatedly having mental-health crises requiring law enforcement intervention in 2011, the officers at the Delaware Police Department knew something needed to be done to stop the cycle.

“I went to the chief and asked him to help gather the directors of various agencies to meet and see what could be done to help those people,” said Officer Rita Mendel.

From the meeting, Delaware County’s Multi-Agency Intervention Crisis Team was born, with Mendel as the Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) coordinator for the police department.

Health officials wanted to help law enforcement, but were bound by the rules of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA), which prevents health-care providers from talking about patients. The solution was asking the individual or a guardian to sign a waiver allowing the exchange of information among law enforcement, mental-health professionals and various county agencies.

For their part, officers complete 40 hours of CIT training.

“Our goal was to have 25 percent of the road officers trained as CIT officers, so if there’s a behavior-health call, we could have on the scene a CIT officer trained to deal with such a crisis,” Mendel said. “We’ve surpassed that goal. ... We have 99 percent of our officers trained.”

For her efforts, Mendel was named the Crisis Intervention Team Coordinator of the Year by the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). The Ohio Attorney General’s Office has given NAMI $246,000 to increase the number of officers with CIT training.

Terry Russell, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness of Ohio, said, “CIT training is important because it provides officers with the skills to recognize when someone is experiencing a mental-health crisis and how to de-escalate the situation. Not only does this reduce the chance of the person with the illness or the officer from getting hurt, it usually means that the person will be taken to a mental-health crisis facility rather than to jail.”

When a person is in crisis in Delaware, a team - including the person in crisis, an officer and representatives from pivotal agencies - is formed to offer ongoing guidance. In one case, a woman, referred to as “E.S.” to protect her privacy, was calling the police several times a shift.

“She would call 911 to say she was sick, but she wasn’t,” Mendel said. “Then she’d call to say someone was bothering her. Then she’d threaten to harm herself. She was always in crisis.”

Mendel assigned herself to the E.S. team along with the woman’s guardian and various mental-health service providers.

“We gave her options,” Mendel said. “We were meeting weekly, then she began to stabilize, and we didn’t need as many meetings.”

Such meetings can take place at the home of the troubled individual, at the police department, at one of the agencies taking part or any other community meeting center. Typically, there are about six people on a team.

“The most amazing thing to come out of the team approach is the communication that has been built among the agencies,” she said.

Cheryl Smart, director of adult support administration at the Delaware County Board of Developmental Disabilities, agreed.

“The biggest benefit of us all getting together is that we’ve all learned what each agency can and cannot do,” she said.
In the community, the individuals that have been helped have gained the most.

“For some of them, being on a team has been their first positive interaction with law enforcement,” Smart said. “That connection has been transformative for individuals. They see that a person cares about them and is interested in them doing a good job. That motivation alone has made a huge difference.”

Today, E.S. is doing well and no longer requires meetings.

“Honestly, a lot of the people we’ve brought on to the teams seem more stable,” Mendel said. “We’ve taken them out of that constant state of crisis and improved their quality of life.”