Baltimore Police improve behavioral health response but need to triple officers trained for crisis response, monitor team says

The Baltimore Police Department has made “substantial progress” in how its officers respond to people with behavioral health issues but fallen short of getting enough officers to take advanced training in how to manage people in crisis, a report by the consent decree monitor team found.

Fewer than 10% of Baltimore Police officers have been trained in “CIT,” short for crisis intervention team, according to the report. The city’s policing consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice requires 30% of officers to be CIT-trained, meaning the department needs to triple the number to achieve that benchmark.

CIT training is supposed to provide officers who volunteer the skills in field evaluations, suicide intervention, available resources, common mental health or disability diagnoses, and crisis deescalation, according to the consent decree.

While such officers are intended to serve as primary responders to calls for service where someone is experiencing a behavioral health-related crisis and a police response is necessary, CIT officers responded to less than a third of behavioral health calls in a sampling of calls from 2022, the new report found. And in only 8.4% of those calls did a patrol officer call for backup from a CIT officer, the department’s crisis response team or a behavioral health provider, the report said.

That lack of CIT-trained officers is one area where the Baltimore Police Department has room to improve on its crisis response, the monitor team report said, but it also said that a shorter behavioral heath program rolled out to all rank-and-file officers has improved patrol officers’ responses.

“The program has dramatically changed the nature of encounters between people with behavioral health disabilities or who are in behavioral health crisis and BPD officers,” the report said. “These encounters, except in rare circumstances, minimize force, apply deescalation techniques, avoid arrests and incarceration, and respect the dignity of the person involved.”

But it’s important, the report’s authors found, that BPD increase the number of CIT-trained officers, remove barriers to the training and ensure those officers are in control of the police response on a behavioral health crisis call.

Baltimore Police agrees there is a need for more CIT officers, spokeswoman Lindsey Eldridge said in an emailed statement. She said the CIT program is promoted in roll calls and by recruiting supervisors to get the training, in the hopes they then will recommend their patrol officers also become certified.

Police Commissioner Richard Worley said in last month’s quarterly consent decree hearing that he was considering offering financial incentives for patrol officers to take CIT training. In roll calls, Worley said, he sometimes asks officers who would be inclined to become certified if there were a monetary bonus and up to half of officers’ hands go up.

BPD also is considering whether a more appropriate goal would be 20-25% of patrol officers trained in CIT, Eldridge said. She said that’s a national best practice, and suggested the Crisis Intervention Plan could be modified to “better align” with that figure. Eldridge added that all SWAT members are CIT-trained, though they don’t count toward the 30% goal for patrol officers.

The Justice Department found in its 2016 report that BPD officers “routinely” used “unreasonable force” against people in mental health crisis or who have mental health disabilities. Officers would handcuff and detain people, the department said, without accounting for their disability or crisis, and arrest people rather than seeking treatment for them.

Eldridge and the monitor team report emphasized that “departmental culture” has shifted away from that. The majority of those types of calls are now resolved without force or arrest, and with “due care” to the rights of individuals, the monitor team said. When force was necessary, it added, it was typically low-level and necessary to prevent self-harm or harm to others.

Still, at least one recent example shows there is room for improvement.

None of the six Baltimore Police officers who responded to a January 2023 call in which Angelina Bolan was in a mental crisis were CIT trained, requested a CIT officer or asked for any non-law enforcement resources. In that case, The Baltimore Sun reported, Bolan was arrested for spitting at officers, after they responded to a call about an abandoned vehicle. Bolan had left her car running in the middle of the street while she got gas.

Two officers told a responding supervisor that they’d been informed Bolan had schizophrenia, to which the supervisor, Sgt. Joshua Corcoran, responded: “That’s her problem.”

He instructed the officers to take her to a hospital, after she said she was going to take her own life. Corcoran told the officers to “make sure you tell them in the ER that she’s under arrest and because she’s under arrest, she’s trying to claim that she’s suicidal.”

Bolan died by suicide in July.

In another case from January 2023, patrol officers alongside CIT officers responded to a Burger King where a man reportedly was “acting erratically,” according to his family’s attorney. Officers spent “a lot of time with him, talking to him,” according to the attorney, Stephen A. Markey III. They ultimately took the man, Paul Bertonazzi, to Johns Hopkins Hospital, where Markey said he suffered a fatal neck injury.

The number of CIT officers in each district varies widely. According to figures in the monitor team report, just 2.5% of Western District officers, two out of 80, were CIT trained. The Eastern District saw the highest percentage of CIT trained officers at 14.3%, with the Northern close behind at 13.9%.

Each district, according to BPD’s Crisis Intervention Plan, needs roughly 28%-30% of its patrol staff certified in CIT.

In total, the monitor team report said, 72 patrol officers are CIT trained; the department would need to recruit and train 174 additional patrol officers to achieve the 30% goal, not accounting for attrition or promotions.

The monitor team identified that at least one barrier to more CIT trained officers was their supervisors. Interested officers reported their supervisors “decline to approve their participation because of the need to require overtime from other officers to cover their shifts while in the 40-hour training,” it said.

“BPD supervisors are not identifying and encouraging officers to become CIT officers in the manner that is necessary to sustain a comprehensive CIT first-responder program,” it said. “Troublingly, based on the Monitoring Team’s best and current understanding, BPD does not yet have a clear plan to address this barrier.”

The monitor team also noted that BPD has responded to fewer behavioral health calls in the last year. Some have been handled by a mobile crisis team or counselor, while others have been handled through the new 988 system.

That’s in line with the city’s overall philosophy of the “least police-involved response possible,” consistent with community safety, for behavioral health crisis calls, as laid out in the consent decree and BPD policy.

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