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Life Lines: Wood County officials consider value of Crisis Intervention Teams amid mental health calls

Wheeling Police Chief Shawn Schwertfeger, center, and Lata Menon, CEO of First Choice Services, left, talked to a group of local mental health officials, local law enforcement and others at the Wood County Resiliency Center on Wednesday about Crisis Intervention Teams (CIT) training and how it might benefit the local area. (Photo by Brett Dunlap)

PARKERSBURG — Officials with a non-profit organization dealing with mental health are hoping Wood County will join in getting first-responders training on how to better respond to calls where someone is in a mental health crisis.

A meeting was held Wednesday at the Wood County Resiliency Center that included representatives of local law enforcement, Westbrook Health Services, the Wood County Sheriff’s Department, the Vienna Police Department, the Wood County 911 Center, the West Virginia Attorney General’s Office, Parkersburg City Council, the Wood County Prosecutor’s Office, local state Delegate Scot Heckert, R-Wood, and others.

The meeting was put on by First Choice Services, a Charleston non-profit that offers several helplines for suicide prevention and other crisis situations, Wheeling Police Chief Shawn Schwertfeger and Westbook Health Services to educate local officials about Crisis Intervention Teams (CIT) and their uses in other areas.

CIT programs are community-based programs that bring together law enforcement, mental health professionals, mental health advocates, and other partners to improve community responses to mental health crises.

Schwertfeger talked about his experience working with the Albemarle County Police Department in Virginia where he was first exposed to CIT procedures in the early 2000s.

He described how before CIT, a lot of their personnel were involved in a lot of officer-involved shootings in situations where officers were forced to draw their weapons and shoot and kill someone. A study was conducted to see how it could be addressed.

“The study that was done on all of those shootings show that 95% of those shootings involved someone in a mental health crisis,” Schwertfeger said.

He went on to describe a situation where officers ended up dealing with a 260-pound individual on the autism spectrum and dealing with Asperger Syndrome in a darkened barn who charged officers with a pitchfork and the officers had to use deadly force to stop the person.

“I can’t guarantee that CIT would change that situation,” Schwertfeger said. “What it might do is prepare officers to think about things like that and maybe ask a couple of additional questions before going down to that barn.

“Sometimes little things like that can change outcomes.”

It is about dispatchers asking questions when calls come in so they can have information to relay to officers in the field to be better prepared. It is also about having information on how to best approach someone who might be in a mental health crisis with information provided by behavior health crisis responders. It is about using de-escalation techniques and more.

Lata Menon, CEO of First Choice Services, talked about how the first CIT program was put in place in Memphis, Tenn., in 1988, but she only learned about it in 2022. There are over 3,000 CIT programs nationwide.

Early in her career, she went on domestic violence calls with officers and saw how officers were interacting with people, on multiple calls to the same location with rising levels of frustration on both sides, and how a different approach might benefit everyone.

“There is a lack of knowledge on both sides that we are not always sharing and CIT can bring all of that information together,” she said.

Menon acknowledges CIT procedures will not eliminate the need for law enforcement to respond nor to use their training to bring a physical situation under control. However, she felt it could better prepare officers to deal with certain situations.

She also said there needed to be better collaboration with Westbrook Health Services who can provide better behavior health support to officers.

“It is about building those partnerships,” Menon said.

As a result of his time in Virginia and in Wheeling using CIT training with his officers, Schwertfeger said they saw a 40% reduction in use of force.

Schwertfeger said he has been involved in situations where he has had to deal with homeless veterans and after getting confirmation to bring the individual to a Homeless Coalition Office he will instruct an officer under his command to transport the individual only to find the officer doesn’t know where that office is located.

“Through CIT training these officers will learn where these offices are,” he said.

Better collaboration between law enforcement and health services will cut down on a perceived animosity between the two groups, Schwertfeger said.

“Many police officers and leaders have no idea what resources are in their own communities,” he said. “When you bring everyone to the table it is so much easier.

“They are trying just as hard as we are.”

Wood County Sheriff Rick Woodyard said they regularly have challenges with mental hygiene situations due to what they have to deal with in getting people transported somewhere that can help, which can require a deputy around 12 hours to effectively deal with, which can take them away from other law enforcement duties.

That leaves the other deputies on shift to deal with gunshot calls and other crime related calls, Woodyard said.

He has worked to utilize court officers and others to take care of sitting at a medical facility until a person is medically cleared to be taken somewhere to be able to keep other deputies on the road. He has also called on state lawmakers to make some changes to the current system to allow them to better handle it.

Heckert said something needs to be done to stop other states from bringing people into West Virginia and dropped off because they don’t want to deal with them. They have been working on that in the legislature. People have been dropped off in Parkersburg, Wheeling, Huntington and other cities.

“That is a big problem,” he said. “I want to help people, but I want to help West Virginians first.”

Still Woodyard is open to having deputies participating in CIT training.

“The CIT model is a good tool to have and use,” he said, adding most of his deputies have had a two-day crisis intervention training session.

Menon said the idea is to bring everyone together and they can help coordinate any training local officials would be interested in.

Brett Dunlap can be reached at bdunlap@newsandsentinel.com

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