St. Paul, MN
Pioneer Press

CriSIs COpS defuse run-ios

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with mentally ill people

Minneapolis police say training helps them settle conflicts with less force
BY AMY MAYRON
Pioneer Press

.
scan TAKUSHI, PIONEER PRESS
Mn~ne~polis police officer Steve Bantle, shown logging a
ca~I.1n hiS squa~ car, is a member of the department's new
Cn~ls-ln~erventl~nTeam. Bantle and other team members were
tr~l~ed In techniques of d~aling with mentally ill people with a
minimum of f0r.ce. The officers say the program is working.

FROM PAGE·1A

Crisis cops
(continued)

Department's
new
crisisintervention training program
on a August evening, Bantle and
Lennander drew on the skills
they had learned about how to
defuse someone like Aaron
Patrick Hite. He would not stop
pacing, defiantly refused to

answer questions and had
access to several knives in his
apartment. In less than 20 minutes and with the promise of
stopping along the way for
rolling papers and a Mountain
Dew, Hite calmly allowed officers to handcuff him and take
him to the Hennepin County
Crisis Center for treatment.
"That had the potential to get
real ugly, real fast," Lennander
said. "Before we were trained,
we may have rushed into the situation and then the fight would
be on. Now, we stand back and
learn to negotiate better."
Minneapolis police have shot
and killed three people with histories of mental illness in the past
three years, leading to an outcry
by the public for police to respond
better to calls for people in crisis.
Partly in response to public concern, training Sgt. Ron Bellendier
and police psychologist Gary fischler last winter attended a
weeklong seminar in Memphis,
Tenn., where the police department was the first to establish a
crisis-intervention team.
A NEW SENSITIVITY

he 40-hour training emphasizes sensitivity toward peoT
ple with mental illnesses and
encourages officers to treat people in crisis as if they were officers' own family or friends having emotional trouble. The most
effective part of the training, officers say, was hearing people who
struggle with mental illness talk
about what it's like when they
lose control and find themselves

. It was just a fluke that Minneapolis
dIspatchers sent Crisis-Intervention
Team officers Steve Bantle and Troy
Lennander to check out the 911 hangup calIon Pleasant Avenue. The officers turned out to be the right men for
the job.
. Judging from the loud music, bangmg and screaming coming from inside
a first-floor apartment of 3118 Pleasant
Ave., the officers thought it could be a
domestic assault. What they discovered was a mentally ill man who was
agitated and had been thrOWing himself against his living-room walls after
getting hyped up about a "WWF
SmackDown!" television show.
Fresh from the Minneapolis Police
CRISIS COPS, 12A

in a confrontation with police.
In 1982, Minneapolis resident
Bruce Ario had a schizophrenic
episode while he was a law student at the University of Minnesota. He stripped naked in a
downtown Minneapolis skyway.
Police called him "off his rocker"
to his face and then arrested him
for indecent exposure and threw
him in a holding cell at the Hennepin County Jail, where he had
his jaw broken by another
inmate who couldn't understand
why Ario was acting erratic.
"People need to look beyond
the illness and see a person of
value and worth," Ario said. "The
police weren't good at that."
Officers today, even without
the special training, would likely
have taken Ario to the Hennepin
County Crisis Center rather than
arresting him.
Minneapolis police have
trained 42 officers since April for
the new crisis-intervention team
and hope to train a total of 120.
Officers are taught to recognize
certain symptoms of mental illness and speak gently to people.
The crisis officers and a few
supervisors are also the only
ones in the department trained
to use Tasers, weapons that
shoot elecfncaIIy charged darts
that render people unable to
move for several seconds.
SPEAKING SOFTLY

risis officer Robert Mooney
thinks of himself as forceful
and curt with people he encounters on the job. He has learned to
rethink that strategy after he
recently used his Taser twice in a
week responding to calls of two
different suicidal men with knives.
One call was at a downtown
parking ramp, where a man was
crouching in a corner with a
knife to his throat. Mooney's
partner, Michael Morales, was
the one who engaged the man,
speaking softly and repeatedly
expressing his concern for the
man. The man talked to Morales
but refused to put the knife
down. Eventually, Mooney fired

C

the Taser at him, and it knocked
the man away from the knife so
officers could restrain him and
take him to the Crisis Center.
Mooney was so impressed
with how his partner handled the
man that he tried the same technique a few nights later. He got
the suicidal man in South Minneapolis to drop his knife, but the
man struggled while officers were
restraining him, and Mooney just
pressed the Taser against the
man's back so they could have a
few seconds to handcuff him.
GOING TO CRISIS

ince June 5, officers have
brought more than 300 people to the Hennepin County Crisis Center, but police have nothing to compare that to. Officers
previously never filled out
reports when they took someone
to the Crisis Center. Now they
do, and police data operators are
creating a computer program to
track those arrests as well as
other Crisis-Intervention Team
information.
The Pleasant Avenue 911
hang-up call was an example of
how crisis-intervention officers
should
handle
themselves.
Though it was hard for officers
Bantle and Lennander to tame
the frenzied man, they eventually gained his trust by listening,
even repeating what he was saying to let him know they weren't
dismissing him. They also told
him that he wasn't doing anything wrong or illegal and that
they were only going to handcuff
him and take him to the Crisis
Center for his own well-being.
Along the way, Hite seemed
concerned about crisis workers
going through his pockets and
asked Bantle to be the one to go
through them first. Bantle did,
and then said to Hite, "We did
what we could for you."
"Vou did good," Hite replied.
"Vou did your job."

S

Amy Mayron can be reached at
amayron@pioneerpress.com or
(612) 338-6872.