By James Felton and Stephen Borowy
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GENESEE COUNTY, MICHIGAN (WNEM) — A training program with the Genesee County Sheriff’s Office with social workers is teaching officers how to handle a wide variety of situations that can be affected by illnesses and mental health disorders.
Officers learn about these situations in a crisis intervention team.
“We have 68 trained law enforcement crisis intervention teams right now,” said Kailey Baker, behavioral health urgent care crisis intervention team supervisor for Genesee Health System.
Baker said the training it offers is important for police officers who respond to a wide variety of situations.
“At this point, we’ve realized that actually in law enforcement a mental health call is generally considered suicidal or homicidal,” Baker said. “But we open it up to everything, to teach about Alzheimer’s, dementia, autism, anything like that, to help kids versus adults and how we talk to them differently just to be successful on the calls. ”.
Meanwhile, Lisa Bruder, crisis services manager at Genesee Health System, said the training program is a hit with officers.
“Officers have told us throughout the last year of this program that this is something they have never known before,” Bruder said. “So by having them connected to resources and having alternatives to jail or going to the emergency room, they have other places to take people in need.”
As for Baker, he said plans to develop a joint response team with the Genesee County Sheriff’s Office are in the works.
“We have contracts with an officer and a sergeant and what they do is make mental health related calls with a mental health professional,” Baker said.
Baker said the training program, which is just over a year old, has been a success. Will look for more ways to make it even better.
“It’s just been a great show so far,” Baker said. “We have many more ideas to evolve and grow. We can’t wait to see where that goes.”
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