| Who Should Attend:
This training is exclusively for law enforcement professionals working in Stark County.
Description: Stark County Mental Health & Addiction Recovery supports the Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) training of law enforcement professionals in our community. Crucial to reducing violence and ensuring successful intervention of mental health and substance use situations, officers are trained in proven and effective communication techniques. The CIT model was first developed and implemented in 1988 by the Memphis, Tennessee Police Department. The Team was developed to address the special challenges to law enforcement posed by persons with mental illness and to better serve the community.
Local training is led by StarkMHAR and Law Enforcement Partners and involves area mental health/drug and alcohol service providers, NAMI of Stark County, and consumers of mental health/drug and alcohol services and their families. This specialized training has the following goals:
- To better prepare police officers to handle crises involving people with mental illness and substance use disorders
- To increase mental health/substance use consumer safety
- To increase law enforcement officer safety
- To increase the feeling of safety in the general community
- To make the mental health/drug and alcohol system more understandable, accessible and responsive to law enforcement to the greatest extent possible with community resources
- To divert persons with mental illness/substance use disorders to the mental health/substance use system, when appropriate, and not to incarceration
Since 2004, Stark County’s CIT Training program has certified hundreds of officers and first responders. Comprehensive 40-hour courses have been provided twice each calendar year. Law enforcement officers are selected by their Chiefs, Sheriff or their designers to attend this training. Participants should be volunteers and ideally should have good communication and interpersonal skills. The goal for all law enforcement agencies is to have, at a minimum, 25% of their first responders trained.
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