Orland Park’s police department has been forced to cancel a crisis intervention training class for law enforcement officials due to the state budget crisis. Thirty-two police officers and two firefighters from 16 suburban departments were scheduled to participate in the classroom instruction.
The 40 hours of training is designed to provide police officers with basic training that helps them identify and interact with individuals suffering from mental illness. State grants provide funding for the program, but due to the political conflict between Gov. Bruce Rauner and Democratic Party leaders in Springfield there is no state budget and the government can’t release the money for the crisis intervention program.
I doubt there will be much of a public uproar about the suspension of police training in this area. It’s not the sort of thing that generates protest demonstrations in the streets. The sad fact is that while people voice all sorts of outrage after someone shoots a TV personality on-camera, opens fire in a crowded movie theater or murders family members, we as a society really don’t want to deal with mental illness in any serious way.
That’s why this state has been allowed to close mental institutions and mental health clinics for years to save money without elected officials fearing any backlash come re-election time. Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart has attracted national media attention by repeatedly demonstrating just how those cost-cutting measures are actually short-sighted because people suffering from mental illness end up losing their jobs, on the streets and often end up committing criminal acts, which results in their detention in Cook County Jail at a far higher cost to taxpayers than mental health treatment.
And those cuts in treatment programs to help the mentally ill are exactly why Orland Park, along with other law enforcement agencies throughout Illinois, have decided to take a pro-active approach to the problem.
“We’re not happy about it,” Orland Park Police Chief Tim McCarthy said about the state freezing funds for crisis intervention training. “We’ve had a year’s experience with the program and we know it helps. We have 12 police officers who have gone through the training and had five more scheduled to take the next class (scheduled to begin Oct. 5).”
McCarthy began preparing for an increase in encounters with the mentally ill after reading newspaper stories about the state’s plans to close the Tinley Park Mental Health Center, the only such facility in the south suburbs, and numerous cuts to the state’s mental health budget over the years.
“We just realized that we had to do something to avoid confrontations with people when we went out on calls and hopefully keep incidents from escalating to the level of a crime,” McCarthy said. “We wanted to do some prevention if we could and it’s turned out that we’ve been able to help entire families coping with this problem and believe the training has been an asset to our entire community by identifying potential problems and addressing issues before they escalate.”
The crisis intervention training sessions run for several days, include instructors trained in psychology and often as many as a dozen professional actors who act as role players. Those actors portray mentally ill people who police come in contact with who are suffering from various mental disorders and the role playing with officers taking the class is intended to give them some idea of how to identify and interact with such a person when responding to a call.
The cost to the state of a typical class is between $15,000 and $16,000, according to an official with the organization that had been scheduled to conduct the sessions in Orland Park and has also worked with the Cook County sheriff’s office.
McCarthy noted that Dart has repeatedly said Cook County Jail is now the largest treatment facility in Illinois for those suffering from mental illness, with more than 20 percent of its occupants undergoing some sort of prescription drug therapy for their problems while incarcerated.
Last month, Dart, along with the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) Chicago held a news conference calling on the state to restore funding for law enforcement mental health training.
In a statement, Dart said, “Crimes such as breaking into an abandoned home to sleep, stealing candy bars to subdue hunger, buying drugs to self-medicate for mental illness – these are acts that generally reflect the need for help, not incarceration. And it takes officers who are properly trained to handle individuals experiencing a mental health crisis, with the realization that incarceration is substantially more expensive than diversion and treatment. For every officer denied access to CIT training, we’re catalyzing Illinois’ descent into fiscal insolvency and solidifying our reliance on incarceration.”
NAMI executive director Alexa James said, “Further delay is unacceptable because it means incarceration will rise for individuals with mental illness. We call upon the governor and General Assembly to use the revenue solutions at their disposal to solve the budget crisis and pass a fully funded yearlong budget.”
Of course, nothing happened. The political games being played in Springfield are apparently far more important to the state’s financial solvency than dealing with the mental health crisis, which has long been ignored by the elected officials of this state.
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And that’s understandable. After all, we’ve seen any number of national news stories break about someone who was mentally ill who ended up killing people and after the initial flurry of hand-wringing on morning TV news shows, everyone simply moves on with their lives. Parents usually get the blame for failing to get their children the help they needed, although that help is usually difficult to find and those families may have indeed done their best to obtain it.
What’s often ignored is that most mental illness is treatable with proper medication if an individual is properly diagnosed. Thousands of Americans suffering from mental illness lead normal lives, going to work each day, attending church, contributing to their communities in a constructive manner. Those are the people who have gotten the medical treatment they needed.
Lt. Joseph Mitchell, director of training for the Orland Park police, during an interview for an earlier column on the department’s mental health intervention efforts, noted that the suburb in 2009 and 2010 reported no involuntary commitments for involuntary treatment of mental illness after responding to calls. There were only two such instances in 2011 and 24 in 2012.
In 2013, with the doors of the state center in Tinley park permanently closed for a year, that number rose sharply to 71 involuntary commitments and in 2014 the number increased to more than 110.
“These people are suffering from serious mental health crisis,” Mitchell told me. “These are not minor incidents.”
That’s why the crisis intervention training unit, launched by Orland Park early this year, is so important.
And it’s not just about helping the individuals suffering from mental illness. It’s about assisting their families, neighbors, friends, co-workers and making the entire community safer.
Did I mention that in the long run it is also more cost-effective than doing nothing until someone actually commits a crime that results in jail or prison time? I think so, but elected officials seem to overlook that point all the time.
Funding for the crisis intervention training program, I have been told, will be restored when the governor and legislative leaders reach an agreement on a budget. No one knows when that is going to be.
But the organizers of the programs tell me it would take months to reschedule the training sessions and they may likely be postponed to next year, even if a budget agreement is reached today. It takes time to organize the instructors and professional actors and law enforcement agencies.
Maybe none of this matters to you. It seems sort of crazy to me. We simply don’t care about anyone who is mentally ill until they kill someone and then hope it’s not a member of our own family.