Norfolk CSB head: Police training has been in works

June 14--NORFOLK -- The head of the city's Community Services Board said Friday that she and the police chief began working on a program to better train police on interacting with mentally ill people long before two fatal confrontations last week.

CSB head Sarah Paige Fuller said she and Chief Mike Goldsmith started forming a crisis intervention team shortly after they were named to their positions in 2012.

Crisis Intervention Teams bring together police and mental health professionals to help officers identify mental illness and learn how to better handle those calls. The hope is to minimize violent encounters and to help mentally ill people receive treatment instead of jail time.

Marylin Copeland, vice president of the Norfolk chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, credits the efforts of Fuller and Goldsmith. But she said Norfolk is years behind many other cities because leaders did not want to fund the program.

The city estimates the cost to be about $550,000 for the first year.

Copeland said she and others began lobbying for a crisis intervention team in 2009, eight years after the first Virginia team formed. In 2011, advocates organized a conference attended by police, she said, but only one City Council member came -- Paul Riddick.

After that, a proposal was taken to the city, but interest waned, she said.

Then came turmoil at the Norfolk CSB after the revelation that a suspended employee had remained on the payroll for 12 years. The agency's former second in command was indicted on a felony and is awaiting trial. The city restructured the agency to make it a city department and brought in Fuller to run it.

Copeland said that from the beginning, Fuller was interested in starting a team.

"She said to me, give me some time," Copeland said. "She had just taken over a dysfunctional agency, but I knew she had the commitment to do it."

Virginia Beach, Suffolk, Portsmouth and Chesapeake have been involved with such teams for some time. Those cities and others started the teams using local funding.

Norfolk waited until state funding was available, Copeland said.

That didn't happen until earlier this year, when Virginia's two-year state budget included millions in new mental health funding, which came about after state Sen. Creigh Deeds' 24-year-old son, Austin "Gus" Deeds, stabbed his father before killing himself.

Fuller declined to comment on why the team hadn't been started sooner. "I don't really have any way to respond to stuff that happened before I got there," she said.

Goldsmith announced the formation of Norfolk's team at a news conference Monday, following the shootings by police of two men who suffered from schizophrenia: Lawrence H. Faine, 72, at Calvary Towers apartments on June 4 and David Latham, 35, on West 30th Street on June 6. Both men were armed with knives, police said.

There was about a year and a half of legal work to do to get the program started, Fuller said. "We want to make sure that whatever we do is sustainable and appropriate."

Training for the crisis intervention team has begun, Fuller said. Some participants are training with teams in other cities and then will train fellow department members.

The next priority is setting up an assessment center, she said.

"It's really best if we see them in the home if at all possible so we can gauge their surroundings," she said. "Someone maybe picked up on the streets, we don't need to see them on the streets."

Those people would go to an assessment center, rather than jail, if appropriate, she said.

The goal is to launch the team in the fall, she said.

Gary Harki, 757-446-2370, gary.harki@pilotonline.com

___

(c)2014 The Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, Va.)

Visit The Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, Va.) at pilotonline.com

Distributed by MCT Information Services