Police Crisis Intervention Training: How it Works, Who it Best Works For

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) -- Minnesota's Crisis Intervention Team (MN CIT) was formed in 2005 as a resource for police training. If all goes well during its 40-hour course, it shouldn't feel like training at all.

Actors re-enact scenarios that officers regularly encounter, varying from domestic abuse calls, suicide, to psychosis. The goal is for officers to use a part of the brain that psychologist Dr. Bravada Garrett-Akinsanya says helps people think clearly, despite what's at stake.

"It's called the prefrontal cortex," said Dr. B, as she's known. "That part of our brain helps us do executive functioning, or problem solving."

The alternative is a potentially dangerous fight, flight or freeze situation, whether a call starts out as a crisis, or turns into one.

"It's, you pull somebody over for a speeding ticket and they're irritated, and now you de-escalate that," said Michael Peterson, who co-founded MN CIT. "It becomes part of the way you do your job every day. Not just when a crisis call comes out."

Peterson says the majority of Twin Cities metro-area departments require the full 40-hour course. Among those who have used CIT training to help lower use-of-force numbers is the Dakota County Sheriff's Department.

"One of the examples is getting down on someone's level," said Sheriff Tim Leslie. "If the individual is sitting on a curb, you sit down on the curb near them and try to have a conversation."

Dakota County officers have used force 20 times in the past two and a half years. That is among the lowest numbers among metro-area sheriff's departments which range in the hundreds, and far lower than Minneapolis and St. Paul police, each either approaching or beyond 1,000 use-of-force incidents.