Greenwood police, Leflore County deputies and other law enforcement officers from around the region, are training today in how to interact more effectively with people suffering from mental illness.
“Safe With Dignity,” a program of the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office, is designed to enhance cooperative efforts between law enforcement and local mental health care providers and to train officers in safe techniques that can help them avoid or work through potentially volatile situations.
Life Help, the community mental health care agency serving Leflore and 11 other counties, will be on hand alongside Tonya Mangus, an investigator for the AG’s office, who is the program trainer.
Paula Broome, director of victims assistance for the Attorney General’s office, said learning the technique of de-escalating a potentially volatile situation is just the tip of the iceberg.
“Tonya will teach the officers about some of the common mental illnesses they might see,” Broome said. “They’ll learn how to recognize red flags and how to read indicators that this might be, say, schizophrenia, or this might be something else.”
Participants will attend a lecture session and then will role play, walking through scenarios that echo situations they might encounter out on the street.
“They are put in a situation and told, ‘Show us how you would handle this,’” Broome said. “Then the trainer will stop them and say, ‘What if you tried this?’”
The idea is to learn how to engage with someone who might, for example, be averse to being touched or be particularly sensitive to tone of voice. Officers will train in how to know when to reinforce something a person is saying and when it’s not productive to do that.
Broome said the training is valuable as a first step at learning more about mental illness, but the real value of the sessions comes from bringing local health providers and law enforcement together.
“What we’ve seen in other sessions is that they’re engaging in a dialogue and finding they really are on the same page, dealing with the same issues,” Broome said.
On both sides, she said, there can be a lot of finger-pointing in which one side accuses the other of insensitivity to the challenge each is facing. Bringing these two entities together enforces that often they are doing the same job — trying to de-escalate a situation when a person with a mental illness has reached a crisis state.
Broome said that in training sessions in other parts of the state, law enforcement didn’t know that the local mental health provider had a Mobile Crisis Response Team, like Life Help’s, that’s on call 24 hours a day to assist in just this kind of situation.
The important thing, she said, is to get the conversation going, understanding the encounter from the point of view of both sides — ensuring both public safety and the safety of the individual in crisis. It also involves understanding that there are some situations you can’t de-escalate, Broome said.
Greenwood Police Chief Ray Moore is sending eight of his officers to the training, including every shift captain.
“They’re the main ones on the street that encounter these people immediately,” Moore said.
Also attending will be Sgt. Terrance Craft, whose job it will be to pass knowledge gained from the training on to officers who can’t attend.
“Often we come upon people who are off their medication and are already in an agitated state,” Moore said. “It’s important to know how to get them some help.
“We don’t want to get out there and hurt anybody. If somebody’s got an idea where somebody knows how to manage a situation and get some help, that’s always better.”
Greenwood police are already working with Life Help to coordinate skills and services, according to Moore and Phaedre Cole, Life Help’s executive director.
“We work with them and the Leflore County Sheriff’s Department, trying to make sure they call us when we’re needed,” Cole said.
Sheriff Ricky Banks said he is sending two men to the training, “and they’ll come back and teach us what’s new.”
Banks said his office runs into tough encounters with mentally ill people in crisis fairly often. “Life Help has said they wanted to work closely with us, and we’re glad they’re helping.”
•Contact Kathryn Eastburn at 581-7235 or keastburn@gwcommonwealth.com.
