By Laurence Hammack The Roanoke Times (Virginia)

The man was clearly a 10-96, police code for a mentally disturbed person.

Calling himself the mayor of Roanoke, he was causing a stir at a downtown business, where he had shown up for a ribbon-cutting ceremony that existed only in his mind.

When two police officers were called to the scene, the man explained impatiently to them that he had to wait until the planets, stars and space station were all perfectly aligned before snipping the ribbon.

Curious pedestrians stopped to stare. The store manager wanted the loud intruder gone. The police officers had to do something.

They could have arrested him. Instead, they listened patiently to his ramblings – defusing delusion with calm authority – and eventually convinced him to walk with them outside.  

It was all part of their training, carried out last week during a role-playing exercise at the Roanoke Police Academy.

Known as crisis intervention training, the weeklong program teaches Roanoke-area police officers how to de-escalate potentially dangerous situations involving the mentally ill.

To do that, they must shed the hard-boiled police mentality – speaking in human terms instead of 10 codes and acting more with compassion than force.

“It’s not against the law to be mentally ill,” Blacksburg Police Lt. Kit Cummings, who led the role-playing exercises, told the class.

Following the situation with the “mayor,” played by retired probation officer Herbert Hastings, Cummings critiqued the performance of two officers who were pulled from the class to intervene.

Roanoke police Officer J.P. Bourgeois and Craig Harris, chief of the Virginia Western Community College police department, correctly evaluated the situation and decided that the mayor did not need to be committed or arrested.

“Although he potentially could have been a threat, he didn’t strike me as a threat,” Harris said. “It was just a matter of waiting him out.”

Harris and Bourgeois would have been within the law to charge the man with trespassing, Cummings said. They could have placed him in handcuffs and driven him to the city jail.

“But is that where he needs to be?” Cummings asked the class.

Psychiatric triage

Crisis intervention is psychiatric triage for street cops. A mentally ill person who commits a serious crime goes to jail.

One who does nothing criminal but poses a danger to himself or others will likely be committed to a mental hospital. Other less serious cases might simply require a call to a family member, a referral to a community-based support system or a drive to a homeless shelter.

The overall idea “is to intervene early and to get people connected to resources,” said Diane Kelly, executive director of Mental Health America of Roanoke Valley.

Twice a year, Kelly’s organization puts on the crisis intervention training. Last week, the session included 37 police officers, emergency dispatchers, correctional officers and other law enforcement personnel from around the Roanoke Valley.

Since 2008, Mental Health America has sponsored seven of the 40-hour classes, reaching a total of 152 officers. Before 2008, the training was offered by the Roanoke County Police Department.

The concept is based on the “Memphis model,” a program that was initiated in 1988 by the Memphis (Tenn.) Police Department after public outcry over the police shooting of a mentally ill man who was cutting himself with a knife.

More than 4,000 police officers in Virginia have received training from 31 crisis intervention programs across the state, according to Del. Joseph Yost, R-Blacksburg, who is closely involved with mental health issues at the legislative level.

In the New River Valley, a crisis intervention program has existed since 2003.

For the most part, officers volunteer for the programs, which satisfy annual training requirements from the state Department of Criminal Justice Services. After completing a week of training, each is certified as a crisis intervention team member.

Using the approach can lower recidivism rates among the mentally ill by as much as 58 percent while also reducing the number of police officers injured during mental disturbance calls, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

Most of the larger police departments strive to have a certain percentage of their force trained in crisis intervention.

While the numbers vary, agencies should aim for at least 25 percent to enable a mental health specialist to be available each shift, said Mira Signer, executive director of the Virginia NAMI chapter.

From absurd to intense

For the first two days of last week’s program, the class attended lectures about suicide risk assessment, the civil commitment process and other topics.

Then came the hands-on training.

Not knowing what to expect, two 911 dispatchers were called to the front of the room and told to sit in side-by-side chairs in an imaginary communications center.

Cummings then took a seat in a chair directly behind them, facing in the opposite direction.

“Bam!” he yelled. Both dispatchers flinched. “That was the first barrel of a double-barrelled shotgun. You’ve got three minutes to convince me to live.”

What followed was an education in how to deal with a suicidal 911 caller.

The daylong role-playing was especially helpful, said Guy Gibson, a police officer at Virginia Western.

“It makes the training more realistic,” he said, while encouraging officers to break out of their traditional roles.

“You need to get out of the gung-ho, take-charge kind of thing and go from that macho image to being more compassionate, kind of like a social worker,” Gibson said.

As long as police officers continue to arrest the nonviolent mentally ill, “they’re not getting the services they need,” Yost said. “They’re just bouncing back and forth between the jail and their community.”

The legislator had a part in Wednesday’s training. One of the roles he played was a hyperactive rabbit breeder who thought his brilliant business plan was being stymied by a pet store owner who refused to sell him a male and female rabbit.

“I can sell the bunny rabbits and get rich!” he told the two officers who responded to a call from the store owner. “I need bunny rabbits! Make him sell them to me! Taze him!”

Although many of the role-playing exercises drew laughter from the class members, Yost said they were all based on real-life situations.

Tellingly, few of them involved violence or even the potential for bloodshed.

Studies have shown that less than 4 percent of seriously mentally ill people are potentially violent, Yost said.

Yet public discussion of improving the mental health system always seems to peak after a major disaster, such as the mass shootings at Virginia Tech and, more recently, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut and a movie theater in Colorado.

By catching mentally disturbed people early and getting them the help they need, training sessions such as the one last week in Roanoke aim to prevent the next disaster.   

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