Roanoke County police project focuses on getting services to those with mental illness

Roanoke County police are launching an initiative designed to provide mental health services to people who might not seek out treatment on their own.

The three-year program is a collaboration with the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy at George Mason University and Intercept Youth Services in Roanoke. It's in response to officers spending time on calls trying to help people with mental illness - an area that is not their expertise - and those people not getting the treatment they need, Chief Howard Hall said.

"Instead of taking someone in a crisis into custody or leaving them alone, wouldn't it be better to get them immediate contact with a mental health professional who is better suited to help?" he said.

The program was in the works before two county officers fatally shot 18-year-old Kionte Spencer in February. Hall has said the teen, armed with a broken BB gun, had struggled with mental health issues, but it's unclear whether that factored into the incident. However, Hall said it was a reminder of the importance of providing mental health services to people who need them, and it appeared that Spencer had stopped treatments prior to the shooting.

"I was really hoping by telling the community about Mr. Spencer, it would recognize this problem we have of how to prevent someone with mental illness from getting in a position where something like this happens," Hall said.

A new approach

County officers who respond to mental health calls can provide information about what treatment is available. But they can't guarantee that a person who needs help will actually seek it out.

"Often, you have someone who hasn't committed a crime, but the officer knows something isn't quite right and is unsatisfied just leaving them," said Assistant Chief Jimmy Chapman, who has been integral in developing the new project. "Then this person deteriorates further and there are repeat calls to police and then this person ends up having to be hospitalized."

Through the project, some people at risk of hospitalization or in need of intervention will receive services from Intercept's Crisis One mobile crisis unit.

When officers respond to a mental health-related call and don't need to arrest the person, they'll call one of Intercept's licensed clinicians, who will be available around the clock. The mental health professional will stabilize the person, which could take place in the person's house or in a calmer environment, like a library or a nearby fast-food restaurant. From there, the clinician will develop a package of services suited to the person's needs. The entire process can take a couple of days from first contact to follow-up conversations.

"Sometimes officers being there can increase tension," said Dale Hamann, regional manager of Crisis One. "We can better ascertain the services someone needs by putting a licensed clinician in the house."

Intercept provides mental health services primarily to Medicaid recipients, but Hamann says this project will allow the provider to reach more people.

The police department hopes that getting people on treatment plans will decrease the number of repeat calls to police, Hall said - as well as the likelihood that officers will have to use force.

Additionally, once the clinician arrives, the officers can leave, freeing them up to respond to other calls.

Of the 28,100 calls for service Roanoke County officers responded to in 2014, mental health-related calls accounted for just 2 percent. But those calls take up a disproportionate amount of officers' time - they spend an average of two and half hours on a mental health call, and sometimes up to six hours on incidents that require an emergency custody order or temporary detention order, when officers believe the person may hurt themselves or others and requires hospitalization.

George Mason University will analyze the data gathered from the project. Police want to know if the services helped maintained a person's stability and decreased police contact, arrests and hospitalizations.

If the results are promising, the police department hopes it can receive funding to implement it beyond the grant period. The department is funding the first phase of the project through a $627,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice.

"Hopefully, through this we will be able to identify a better way of using police resources and helping those with a mental illness," Hall said.

Connecting services

Mental health has been a priority for Roanoke County police for a couple of decades. In 1995, the county was the first department in the state to adopt crisis intervention training. The department imported the model developed by the Memphis Police Department, which wanted to train officers on mental illnesses and how to handle people who may have a mental illness.

"It's important that officers know how to de-escalate and avoid making situations worse so they reduce arrests, incarcerations and the number of incidents that escalate to violence," said Diane Kelly, executive director of Mental Health America of Roanoke Valley.

Last fall, police recruits and officers went through a week-long course organized by Kelly and taught by medical practitioners and legal experts. The lessons taught officers how to intervene in ways that are safer, more helpful and less likely to lead to an arrest.

"Often, these police calls require much more patience from officers," said James Reinhard, who taught a session and is an associate director of the Cook Counseling Center at Virginia Tech. "We want to treat people with a mental illness differently, with the understanding that different factors are driving their behavior."

About 80 percent of officers with the department are trained in crisis intervention.

It's difficult to tell whether this training is making a difference since there are no data to measure its effectiveness in the county.

But Officer Dustin Wilcox, the police department's crisis intervention training coordinator, said he's noticed a heightened awareness among some officers who get the training. When he reads their reports, they're better at documenting medications people take and symptoms they exhibit.

"They're learning how to talk to people, and we could all learn how to better use our mouths better as a tool before we use what's around our belts," Wilcox said.

Even so, mental health providers and police officials agree that police officers are not experts when someone is experiencing a crisis. The project is an effort to try and extend efforts so someone with a mental illness receives treatments, Hall said.

"We are not going to solve this problem of helping people in a crisis by training some police officers," Hall said. "There needs to be a way to connect them to someone professionally trained in mental health who knows how best to help them."