Evaluation of ‘the R-Model’ crisis intervention de-escalation training for law enforcement
| Author | Gina Erickson,James Densley,Jillian Peterson |
| Published date | 01 December 2020 |
| Date | 01 December 2020 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0032258X19864997 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Evaluation of ‘the R-Model’
crisis intervention
de-escalation training
for law enforcement
Jillian Peterson
Department of Criminal Justice, Hamline University, Saint Paul, MN, USA
James Densley
School of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice, Metropolitan State
University, Saint Paul, MN, USA
Gina Erickson
Department of Criminal Justice, Hamline University, Saint Paul, MN, USA
Abstract
This study presents findings from a process and outcome evaluation of a custom crisis
intervention and de-escalation training for law enforcement, delivered in-house to a
suburban Minnesota police department (the R-Model: Research, Respond, Refer). Indi-
vidual officer survey data showed the R-Model significantly decreased stigma and
increased self-reported knowledge of mental health resources over baseline. Knowledge
of resources held at the 4-month follow-up. One-year follow-up data at the agency level,
showed decreases in the number of crisis calls for service and the number of repeat calls to
the same addresses, even when compared to crisis call rates at similar police departments.
Findings provide preliminary evidence that the R-Model may be an effective model that
warrants additional study.
Keywords
Mental illness, crisis intervention, policing, program evaluation
Corresponding author:
Jillian Peterson, Department of Criminal Justice, Hamline University, 1536 Hewitt Avenue, Saint Paul,
MN 55105, USA.
Email: jpeterson68@hamline.edu
The Police Journal:
Theory, Practice and Principles
2020, Vol. 93(4) 271–289
ªThe Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/0032258X19864997
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A growing number of police calls involve people who are in the throes of a mental health
crisis when officers arrive on the scene (Hails and Borum, 2003; Watson et al., 2008;
Wood et al., 2017). The lack of mental health crisis services across the United States,
coupled with the deinstitutionalization of patients with mental illness, has resulted in law
enforcement officers serving as first responders to psychiatric disorders, yet police often
have few options on hand for resolving crises (for a discussion, see Lurigio, 2012). While
most people with mental illness are not dangerous or violent (for a review, see Varshney
et al., 2016), mental health advocates argue that police crisis training could prevent
benign civilian encounters from turning deadly and reduce the number of people with
mental illness ending up in jail (National Alliance on Mental Illness, n.d.). According to
Washington Post (2019) databases, mental illness was a factor in 38%of all fatal police
shootings in Minnesota (the site of the current study) from 2015 to 2018, which was
higher than the national rate of 25%.
It was for this reason, amid sweeping 21st-century policing reforms (President’s Task
Force, 2015), that the 2017 Minnesota Legislature mandated all of the state’s 11,000
peace officers to complete at least 16 hours of training on crisis intervention and mental
illness, conflict management, and cultural issues within a 3-year police licensing cycle
(Minnesota Statute § 626.8469). In January 2018, the Minnesota Board of Peace Officer
Standards and Training (POST) approved learning objectives for this training and tasked
the chief law enforcement officer of every one of the state’s 431 police agencies to
provide in-service training to their officers, beginning July 1, 2018.
Even before the mandate, on average, nearly 15%of officers in Minnesota’s 12
largest law enforcement agencies (i.e. agencies with over 100 officers) had completed
the 40-hour Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) training, widely considered the gold standard
of training in this area (Smith, 2017; for an overview of the CIT training model, see
Compton et al., 2008). However, a majority of the state’s law enforcement agencies do
not have the capacity or resources to support the existing CIT model even if it can be
scaled to meet growing demand—75%of agencies have less than 25 officers and 90%
have less than 50 (Minnesota Board of Peace Officer Standards and Training, 2019).
Sending personnel away for 5 days of centralized training is not affordable or feasible
logistically for the average police department, and the context-specific mental health
resources that buttress CIT training typically do not extend beyond the state’s urban
centers (see Compton et al., 2010).
A new paradigm
The popular CIT model was designed to facilitate collaboration between law enforce-
ment and mental health service providers and to divert people with mental illness to
treatment. In theory, therefore, CIT is ‘more than just training’ for police (CIT Interna-
tional, 2017). However, in practice, particularly in Minnesota, CIT almost exclusively
pertains to 40 hours of in-service training (see Peterson and Densley, 2018). A recent
systematic review of the literature concluded that CIT training outcomes were mixed
(Peterson and Densley, 2018). Another systematic review of the effectiveness of mental
health training programs for nonmental health trained professionals, including law
enforcement, reported wide variations in training design, delivery, and content and at
272 The Police Journal: Theory, Practice and Principles 93(4)
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