GERALD
As part of my job as Director of Continuity of Care at NFETC, I organized and ran a statewide forensic coordinators meeting for many years. We met four times a year for five years. It was a great opportunity to make contacts. At one of those meetings, I met an individual who had CIT in his county at the time--Pinellas County. He talked about CIT and from that encounter I had some brief awareness about what CIT was.

Last Feb 2004, Alachua County decided to start training CIT officers. We scheduled a community meeting in April 2004. We invited individuals throughout the state of Florida who had experience with CIT. Representatives from community mental health agencies attended along with a lot of law enforcement. There was interest over CIT, not overwhelming enthusiasm, but there was enthusiasm. After the meeting, a CIT committee was created that worked through a lot of different issues—basically, what’s the best way of doing this? We eventually decided to send seven staff members to Memphis, Tennessee for training. The seven staff included a mother whose son has a mental illness, three law enforcement officers, and three mental health professionals. We received a six thousand dollar grant from the Advocacy Center and that partially funded the travel. The team developed a curriculum and set a schedule, and here we are at the end of the first CIT training in Alachua County.

It’s a proven program. Once it started in Memphis, I think it has expanded to forty cities throughout the country. It’s a proven program for enhancing officer safety as well as increasing the safety for consumers. It also brings a lot of satisfaction to family members knowing that CIT is working with their disabled and mentally ill children.

The officers more or less volunteered, others were advised to take the training. Whitney Stout, Corey Warren, and Jim Lybarger basically recruited officers. They did some PR internally with law enforcement officers to sell the program. Twenty-four officers volunteered, but twenty-two actually attended the CIT training.

The program is rather self-funding. Almost all of the trainers are participating on their company’s time because their employers have bought into the need for CIT in Alachua County. The Police Academy is paying for the assembly of the booklets and the use of their facility is free. We might need some cash for meals, but it’s largely rather self-funding.
In the future, we will continue to improve the quality of the training. We’ve already identified some things we could change to make it a little better--we’ll implement those things. We also need to find a way to get the VA programs more on board. Hopefully, the officers who have gone through this will be our reps. and we’ll have full and consistent classes. They’ll say, “this has been great training. I really learned a lot from this.”

Once Lt. Lybarger and Sgt. Stout train dispatch, the dispatch will know to call CIT officers when it looks like a mental health consumer is involved in a call. The idea is that we should have enough CIT officers who are trained so that there is one on every shift, for every geographic zone--that’s why it’s going to take us three years to do this. We plan to train about one-hundred officers a year. It’s going to take about three-hundred officers to cover everything. Right now, we’re going to be spread very thin for CIT officers. Next training with different officers will be in June, then August, and then there’s one at the end of October/beginning of November.