The Police Officers When Dealing With People With Mental...

How well prepared are the police officers when dealing with people with mental health illness. According to, the American Psychological Association (2013) define, â€Å"crisis intervention as the brief ameliorate, rather than specifically curative, use of psychology or counseling to aid individuals, families, and groups who have undergone a highly disruptive experience, such as an unexpected bereavement or a disaster† (p.148). The police officers are trained to observe, predict, and react. They maintain the order and reinforce the law in our society. It is estimated that as many as 10% of all police interactions involve persons with severe mental illness (SMI) and that of all incarcerated individuals, 14.5% males, and 31% females suffer†¦show more content†¦Certainly, during those cases the law enforcement officers do not have a psychology expertise to recognize some signs that might take more than just looking at an individual. Furthermore, individuals under the i nfluence of alcohol or drugs may behave similarly to a person with a mental illness. Moreover, to the setting of the behavior, if the individual has a firearm that could potentially hurt the law enforcement officer as well as any civilian around the perimeters, the officers can arrest the individual. In which case afterward he or she must then contact their crisis intervention team (CIT) and request a psych evaluation of the individual to determine what will be the best setting for arrested personnel. For example, Browning, Van Hasselt, Tucker, Vecchi, (2011) mentioned â€Å"such individuals in crisis may suffer from hallucinations and delusions. This may cause them to respond unpredictably to police, and can even cause them to react to internal auditory or visual stimuli that are not present to others† (p. 236). In contrast, if the law enforcement officer might does not has a psychological background then he will still have to undergo a forty hour training in mental illnesses. The issue is that forty-hours a week of training does not make up for four or six years of training as requested by the crisis intervention team, (Watson, Fulambarker, 2012). When law enforcement