Crisis Intervention Training Wraps Up for Lakewood Police Department

The Police Departments that encompass the Westshore Enforcement Bureau — including the Lakewood Police Department — are pleased to announce the first Crisis Intervention Teams have completed initial training and certification.

More than two-dozen area police officers received more than 40 hours of training, as part of a partnership with Cuyahoga County’s Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services, as well as the National Alliance on Mental Illness of Greater Cleveland and Frontline Services.

The idea is to learn how to better respond to people in crisis and working to resolve those situations peacefully with efforts to connect those citizens with appropriate community services.

The Lakewood Police Department comes into contact with many individuals who are experiencing a mental health crisis through any number of situations. Lakewood Police Chief Timothy Malley said that having officers trained in techniques to de-escalate these encounters with the goal of a peaceful resolution is “consistent with the goals of the Lakewood Police Department.”

“These specially trained officers are able to work with community providers to refer and assist the citizens they come into contact to the appropriate agency that can provide help,” Malley said. “Connecting citizens with resources to assist them in crisis will reduce the calls for service for the police department and the sometimes repetitive responses to the same people.”

In addition to Lakewood, WEB is represented by police departments from Bay Village, Fairview Park, Lakewood, North Olmsted, and Westlake, along with the Cleveland Metroparks,

These crisis intervention teams will operate under the policy and procedures of each Police Department but with cohesiveness in training that will produce consistent responses across the Westshore Region.

Under the CIT national model these specially trained officers will respond to incidents of persons experiencing mental health crisis and use their specific training to attempt to resolve the incident peacefully with a focus on follow up treatment by our community partners. Future training sessions are planned to add to the members of these teams.

“The Lakewood Police Department is proud of its longstanding cooperative work with the agencies of the Westshore Enforcement Bureau,” said Malley. “Through this inter-agency cooperative effort we are able to bring this nationally recognized training to our citizens.”