Cape CopCast
Welcome to "The Cape CopCast," the official podcast of the Cape Coral Police Department.
Hosted by Officer Mercedes Simonds, and Lisa Greenberg from our Public Affairs team, this podcast dives into the heart of Cape Coral PD's public safety, community initiatives, and the inner workings of our police department. Each episode brings you insightful discussions, interviews with key community figures, and expert advice on safety.
Cape CopCast
Chief's Chat #3: Police Training on Mental Illness & Upcoming NAMI Walk
Officers within the Cape Coral Police Department are equipped not just with the tools of law enforcement, but also the skills to compassionately handle mental health crises. Discover how our collaboration with the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) provides our department with vital Crisis Intervention Training (CIT) programs. In this episode of the Cape CopCast "Chief's Chat," we dive into the essential role law enforcement plays in mental health as we start planning for next year's impactful NAMI Walk in Southwest Florida.
Through our partnerships with NAMI, we explore the benefits of specialized training for handling complex conditions such as Autism and Alzheimer's. We highlight the crucial need for community support, urging engagement in activities like the upcoming walk in March, which not only sustains vital services but also empowers us to address mental health challenges head-on. Your participation can make a lasting impact, helping to create a community where mental health awareness and support are prioritized.
>>LEARN MORE: www.namilee.org
Welcome back to another special episode of the Cape, the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
Speaker 2:I think we consider ourselves part of the alliance and a lot of what we do is geared toward mental illness, because we run across a lot of people with mental illness. So essentially, it's very important for us to be trained well in that area.
Speaker 1:For sure. And I know, Chief, you're on the board for NAMI.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm on the board of directors, proudly serving for my third year on the National Alliance of Mental Illness, nami, southwest Florida, and it's a great organization doing a lot of great work in the community and I'm just proud to be here.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and I remember last year going to the walk. You know I've been here for almost a year now, it's hard to believe, but going to the walk and seeing how so many of our officers showed up for the walk, it's a big event that's in the community and I know now we're in the planning stages for this year's walk and so we just kind of wanted to get into why it's so important that we are involved with NAMI and the ways we are involved with NAMI and the training that our officers go through when it comes to dealing with people who are in crisis.
Speaker 3:Well, you mentioned the walk, and the NAMI walk is our NAMI Southwest Florida's number one fundraiser for the year, and the NAMI walk right now is the best kept secret in Southwest Florida and we're trying to get that secret out. So we're in the planning stages for it and we'll talk a little bit more about what NAMI does. But while we're on the topic of the walk, it's March 8th, it's a sunset walk in Centennial Park, so there's a couple hours before the actual walk. There's bands and great family time, food trucks, beer trucks, there's a giant playground They've really recovered from Ian, centennial Park is back and beautiful and then there's a 5K.
Speaker 3:Last year was the first 5K, so there's the walk and the 5K and it's a real 5K, with the metal and the shirt and everything that the 5K community is into and also the walk it goes along Edwards, along the river, and then we have the one span of the Edison Bridge blocked off and you walk over the bridge right at sunset. It's beautiful and the goal is to raise awareness for mental health and everybody is impacted either directly or indirectly by mental health, either directly or indirectly by mental health, and the bottom line is we, being law enforcement, are a major critical partner with everyone when it comes to responding to crisis and mental health, and that's why it's important, I think, for police to be represented, the Cape Coral Police Department in particular and I've taken that on myself to be on the board of directors.
Speaker 3:You can come out and support it. You can come out and participate. We ask that you get your family and friends together, or your coworkers or your community, and form a team, raise a little bit of money for sponsorship and come out and be with all like-minded people who are aware of mental health concerns and are part of the solution. That's what it's about.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely so. Alongside that, we have what we call CIT training crisis intervention training for police officers within our department. I've taken it. I've actually taken it at my old department and this department, partially just because it's so critical, and why wouldn't you take a refresher course anyway? But Vacherie Howard, she's in charge of a lot of the NAMI trainings and things like that. She's awesome.
Speaker 3:She's the executive director of NAMI, southwest Florida. A lot of people don't realize that CIT, or crisis intervention training, that's a trademarked, legitimate curriculum. So the class you took at your former department in another state is very similar, if not exactly the same, as we take here. There's little nuances to your community, but it's a name brand. Well, cit is administered by NAMI. So when you talk about getting police officers and first responders, crisis intervention training, that is NAMI.
Speaker 1:And so we have officers again who take this training and it's part of responding to those critical incidents so that they're armed with the tools and the information and the resources and the knowledge that they need to get through a crisis type of situation. Can you talk a little bit about that, sure?
Speaker 3:And I'll be chiefly and serious for a moment, long before the quote, unquote reckoning of 2020, when we had to reimagine how everything happened in this country, in particular law enforcement. We've been a CIT agency. We believe in partnership with the continuum of care, mental health professionals, training, law enforcement so that we have exactly what you said the tools and the abilities to respond the right way when not if, but when there is a mental health crisis. And what some in the country I won't even say the community, because we have a very supportive community who understands I think they're very educated on the topic is that I don't see any scenario and we're seeing that play out in the country where those jurisdictions and those areas said we don't want law enforcement going to mental health crisis calls. They're all backtracking and if you look at some of the ballot initiatives that happened in those states, they're flooding money to get back where they should have never left.
Speaker 3:We in Florida and we at Cape Coral PD never left. So when a a family member of yours or a household member of yours is experiencing a mental health crisis not living with mental health, but going into crisis, not taking their medication something has triggered them and they are not just upset, but they are violent, threatening or committing self-harm, threatening or committing harm to others being in the house, or they've gone out into the community and you need help. That is not the time for a clinician alone to go. So the idea of completely removing law enforcement from that scenario, which is where we get involved, is a non-starter.
Speaker 2:It's impossible.
Speaker 3:It's impossible to do. It's possible if you want people to get hurt.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 3:So eventually, what's going to happen is they're going to need us anyway, mental health or not. Now you have a clinician or a family member or somebody not equipped to be able to deal with the situation and the situation being a violent or potentially violent person. Take the mental health out of it. Who are you going to call? Right, you're calling the police department. Now, if you've defunded or redirected, funded or cut funding for mental health training, now the officer that's going to show up is not equipped, and then you see tragedies happen that nobody wants. The officers don't want, the family certainly doesn't want. So the better option is to invest into the people who are going to go so that in that scenario, I'm not opposed to clinicians going, certainly before crisis. That will prevent a crisis. I think it's a wonderful idea.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 3:I think a hybrid model where officers and clinicians go together in certain circumstances work. You can't always predict when you're going to get those calls or where you're going to go, so you wouldn't pay a clinician to ride with an officer all day, every day, and a lot of communities aren't large enough to have a specialized unit that just goes for that. That may be something in the future. So we've experimented with a couple of hybrid models like that having a clinician or a mental health professional ride with a specialized unit and go when you can. It doesn't always work that way. It could be the other side of town, a rapidly evolving event.
Speaker 3:It could be when they're not doing that, or they're tied up on another call and then you're back to what are you going to do?
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 3:You better have your first responders, your frontline, your patrol bureau, trained to respond to that. That's why we invest in crisis intervention training. So because of that that failed experiment, we're back to when something happens like that big blue is coming.
Speaker 3:So you might as well invest in the in the right kind of training certified, recognized, legitimate working training and I can tell you that it works, because we've awarded people for successfully deescalating situations.
Speaker 3:We can show you the success stories you see on the national news and even the local news, sometimes where it doesn't work or where it wasn't applied properly. But when you have the right training and you invest in it and you use the prescribed model that we do, I can point to countless examples of where it does work. And unfortunately that doesn't make the news. We do our best to publicize it to try to flip that narrative. But if you don't invest in those types of things and provide for your first responders, then you don't know what you're going to get when they get there. You could have the most well-intended person good heart, and if you don't know exactly how to deal with a schizophrenic in crisis or bipolar or any number of things that you're taught to recognize, is it the magic bullet and solve them all? No, it certainly isn't, but it's another tool for us to drive towards success.
Speaker 2:Right and just going to a lot of different situations and things like that. You don't know what you're walking into. I mean, you could just have an evolving domestic situation and you don't know that. You know they say alcohol or something might be involved, but really it's a mental health issue and so you might have someone who's combative, violent. We have to go assess what's going on. But if you have a trained person, they're able to say maybe this is an underlying issue and maybe they really need to be Baker acted, maybe an arrest is't an appropriate situation there could be a different outcome that is actually more beneficial for the family and everything going on.
Speaker 1:It's constantly evolving.
Speaker 3:You highlighted something there where there are calls that start from the initial 911 call I have a family member in a mental health crisis and it starts and finishes just like that but there are many calls that don't. We don't have that information. We have my son, my adult son, is throwing things around. We're having a fight. There's no illusion to or no, no notification that it's a mental health crisis and we show up as if it's a domestic call or somebody's doing a retail theft and they're fighting with the loss prevention. And then you get there and realize, oh my gosh, I've been trained, I'm recognizing right away, in real time, exhibiting signs of mental health and it can change the way you interact with that individual and hopefully prevent a tragedy.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. We had a recent case that we did publicize, where it was a situation in which an adult son was throwing things around and combative with his parents, who called and, and he ended up having what was it? Two knives.
Speaker 2:He had two hatchets, large hatchets.
Speaker 1:And our officers were able to deescalate. You know the situation and you know it's because of that training that those situations are possible, that we are able to have that kind of outcome.
Speaker 3:Right and there's a phrase that's in executive leadership, that's around the country, for use of force or officer-involved shootings. It's called lawful but awful. And that's exactly what it is. It's a lawful thing. You are permitted by the circumstances in the black and white letter of the law that a use of force or lethal force was justified. It doesn't make it great right Lawful but awful. And what we try to do is mitigate those circumstances where it's lawful and we find alternate ways when we can to find a more peaceful resolution. And you don't do that by hoping and wishing and thinking really hard. You do it by having approved legitimate investment in training and that's what we do.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and alongside NAMI they have different trainings other than just CIT. I went to an advanced CIT class focused on autism and Alzheimer's and that was also really helpful, because how many calls do we go to where maybe someone's lost, you have a missing person, and you have to recognize all these different behaviors and things like that. Maybe you see a kid on the street and you can kind of you know, if you try to talk to them, maybe they can't talk back. That might be a sign or something like that. There's just a lot of different. Obviously, autism's a spectrum, but just to learn more about that and that's incredibly helpful, just to be able to spot that and to know what's going on, to have just that extra layer of additional training, because Alzheimer's and things like that in Florida you might have kind of a higher population that deals with that alongside autism. I think autism has gotten to be either more diagnosed or more common and we're seeing more and more of that. So just being able to have the tools to deal with that is essential.
Speaker 3:Sure, a couple of points. You mentioned having that here in Florida. People forget that we're the third largest state population-wise in the country. So if there's something out there, it's here. And then in that, the third largest state in the country, cape Coral, is the eighth largest city within the third largest state. So if there's something out there, there's something here. So you got to be prepared for all of it.
Speaker 3:And it's not just CIT, nami does we talk about CIT? Because that's what first responders and communications personnel deal with, because they do offer a course for dispatchers and 911 operators as well to be able to deal with people not in person but over the phone. Aid for teens. They do mental health first aid for employers. They do all kinds of training for corporate so you know how to respond to employees or customers that come in to maybe prevent having to get into CIT type of a training if they can de-escalate or recognize things. They also provide services for people who need it but can't afford it, and all of these things that we talk about. You get what you pay for, right. It costs money.
Speaker 3:So that's what the fundraising is for, that's what the walk is for, that's why we have corporate sponsors. I've reached out to my personal network and I've been overwhelmed. I had to turn it off and go. We're good Because the overwhelming response that want to sponsor our team. We have the largest contributing team, a couple years in a row now, where we have 30 or 40 of our staff come out with our team shirt. We do the walk to show people that if you want to be a part of the solution, you've got to be about it. You can't just talk about it or post about it. You've got to go about it. You can't just talk about it or post about it. You've got to go out there and do it. So that's why we belong and that's how NAMI is a big holistic 360 partner for the community.
Speaker 1:For sure. So we definitely want to encourage people to get involved and to participate in the walk that's coming up in March. We'll put a link on this episode. We'll put it in the episode description. We'll also post it on social media so anyone who's interested can join a team and be a part of it.
Speaker 3:Help us raise money for NAMI because it really is just an incredible organization. It's a great cause and all the money directly impacts services that, like we said at the beginning, every family, within a very few degrees of separation, is impacted by mental health in the schools, with counseling on the street, in homes, with domestic situations. This is how you make that impact, so it's a great opportunity. March is a beautiful time of year. We used to do it in September. I don't know why anybody would schedule anything in September anymore. It always gets moved. March is great because the weather is crisp and dry. We're not watching the tropics, we're not waiting on spaghetti models or anything like that. The only thing we may have to worry about is you might have to wear a hoodie, and I could think of worse problems to have.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, I would love to wear a hoodie. Yes, awesome. Was there anything else you want to talk about, chief? Not today. Awesome.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you for joining us. It's really been a pleasure to talk about NAMI and the different resources that we have like that, and our involvement.
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:We'll catch you next week, see ya.
