Bay County Sheriff's Office holds training on how to properly engage the mentally ill

Sep. 6--PANAMA CITY -- Bay County Sheriff's deputies recently took 40 hours-worth of training to help them deal more effectively with mentally ill people.

The Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) Program provides training and education to law

enforcement officers to assist them in more effectively managing crisis events in the community. Class participants receive 40 hours of specialized instruction from behavioral health experts from their community, previously trained CIT officers and actual consumers and family members.

Part of the training deputies did was try to complete tasks while wearing headphones that simulate what somebody who is hearing voices would be going through.

"These are voices that somebody with schizophrenia would hear and while they're (deputies) listening to it is when we get them to do other tasks," said Dr. Joyce Carbonell, CIT coordinator and clinical psychologist. "They start to realize how difficult it can be to tend to any kind of activity while you're having these voices in your head."

One of the key things the instructors do during the classes is break the perception or bias of what officers might have with somebody who is mentally ill. One of the ways they do that is through jokes.

The instructor asked the deputies what are some of the jokes they've used and it would be phrases like "cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs," and similar jokes. Then the instructor would ask about jokes for people with cancer and there was an awkward silence because, according to Carbonell, people tend not to make jokes about cancer patients.

"When we know somebody who has a serious illness like cancer we say 'Oh they're brave, they're ill, they have cancer' but when it's a person who has a mental illness like schizophrenia we just say that's a schizophrenic," Carbonell said. "We certainly wouldn't call a person who has cancer that 'Oh that's just a cancer,' so there are people behind those mental illnesses."

Bay County Sheriff Tommy Ford has put an emphasis on this kind of training for his deputies because situations dealing with people who are mentally ill can be volatile. The training is working in concert with the Florida Sheriff's Association, which has received a state grant for the past several years to conduct the classes.

BCSO has conducted about five courses, including the one conducted last week, since the FSA has been receiving the grant money. The grant money helps pay overtime for the deputies because about 15 are doing the training and the BCSO has to cover their shifts.

There have been organizations across the country that have recently pushed for social workers to handle cases that deal with somebody who has a mental illness instead of law enforcement. With national protests that call for better training for law enforcement in general, including how to deescalate situations that deal with a mentally ill person, Ford said his office has been ahead of the curve.

"It is being talked about nationally, but we've had our foot on the gas with trying to get to this training for the last five or six years in conjunction with Big Bend Community Based Care and the FSA to get ahead of the issue," Ford said. "As you look around the country, this particular training class, CIT, is the gold standard in law enforcement for training our deputies and officers."

Ford said there has been an increase in these cases, whether it is dealing with children in schools or the community because the community has been through a lot the past couple of years, referring to Hurricane Michael and the COVID-19 pandemic. Ford wants to continue training his deputies until they're all trained to better handle situations when dealing with somebody who is mentally ill.

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