Police to get crisis intervention training.

Byline: Rebecca Taylor The Register-Guard

Eugene police officers will receive additional training in how to handle people experiencing mental health crises in the wake of last year's controversial police shooting of a mentally ill man, but exactly how the training will be administered remains to be seen.

Police Chief Robert Lehner told the city's police commission on Thursday that the department has long considered adding so-called "Memphis model" training to its repertoire, but a state House bill passed this session requiring 24 hours of crisis intervention training for all new police recruits complicates the issue.

"If the question is, will the Eugene Police Department implement crisis intervention training, the answer is, yes," Lehner told the commission at its monthly meeting. "Now it's just a matter of putting together how we're going to do it."

Lehner was responding to the police commission's unanimous motion that the department consider creating a crisis intervention team to deal with the potentially violent mentally ill. A commission sub-committee spent the past several months studying ways to enhance police officer training on the issue in the wake of a shooting last November that killed 19-year-old Ryan Salisbury in his family's driveway.

Salisbury suffered from bipolar disorder and was in the midst of a psychotic break when he went on a violent rampage in his family's home Nov. 14. Police fired five shots as he walked toward them holding a kitchen knife after beanbag rounds and officers' orders failed to stop him.

The subcommittee examined several options before settling on the "Memphis model," in which interested officers receive training from mental health experts to deal with potentially violent crisis situations. The model has been adopted in more than 70 cities and is credited with reducing the use of deadly force and injuries to the police and the public in those cities. Portland police and the Clackamas County Sheriff's Office have introduced similar programs.

About a dozen people expressed support for the subcommittee's proposal at Thursday's meeting, including local mental health experts and Salisbury's parents, Jeff and Denise Salisbury, who have called for crisis intervention training and, as a last resort, the use of Taser stun guns.

"Those two extra tools will result in saved lives of good people who are afflicted with terrible illness," Jeff Salisbury said. "We definitely want (Ryan's) legacy to be saved lives."

Commissioner Joe Alsup, who headed the subcommittee, said widespread defunding of the mental health system - including the closure of the county mental hospital in 2004 - has made the city's police officers de facto mental health practitioners. From 2001 to 2003, about 14,000 mental-health-related calls were dispatched to police or CAHOOTS, a volunteer crisis intervention service run by Eugene's White Bird Clinic. That number is rising, he said. The subcommittee wants to provide 40 hours of crisis intervention training to 20 percent to 25 percent of the police force to ensure that someone with experience is available during every shift.

"Our officers, I think, are doing an outstanding job, but what they're being asked to do is overwhelming and getting worse," he said.

The training would be part of a broader effort that, if money were no object, would include increased CAHOOTS services, expansion of Eugene's Mental Health Court, reopening of the county's psychiatric hospital and creation of a 24-hour mental health crisis center - all of which the subcommittee intends to study further.

Local mental health experts including Lane County Mental Health, ShelterCare and the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said they support the concept. "People have lined up, agencies are champing at the bit to make this work," Alsup said.

But the police chief said the new state law will affect the way the training is done. Current officers will have to be given the same training now required for new recruits to ensure consistency in police response, he said. How that will affect the commission's vision of a crisis intervention team remains unclear. And funding is always an issue.

"Those two requirements somehow need to work together in a way that gets maximum results," Lehner said. "I think that we can ultimately do better than what you all were envisioning."