Crisis Intervention Teams: Assessing their Scope and Impact

• In Event: Police Interactions with Special Populations

Abstract

Crisis Intervention Teams (CITs) are a key policing reform of the past 20 years. Yet, CITs have been under-theorized in the policing literature, and their usefulness as a mechanism of social outreach remains unclear. Most CITs target the severely mentally ill, although some programs have been designed to deal with drug addicted populations and others. Furthermore, even to the extent that CITs exist, they sometimes fall short of their stated purpose. This paper is a critical assessment of CITs in the United States with three objectives. The first is to assess the scope of these programs. Who do they attempt to reach out to and why? The second pertains to questions of failure. Have CITs fallen short of their attempts at reaching out to their target populations and why? Three, what is the typical make-up of a CIT unit. Are they linked to community policing initiatives and if not, why not? To answer these questions I will provide a meta-analysis of studies on CIT programs published in the past three years drawn primarily from the criminological literature. To limit the number of cases, I will only be concerned with cities that have populations above 150,000.

Author

• Barry Goetz, Western Michigan University