Help on the Street: Crisis Intervention Team and Justice Involved Services
For years, Oaks has partnered with law enforcement agencies to help improve the quality of first-responder interactions with persons living with mental health or addiction disorders. The Crisis Intervention Team, commonly referred to as “CIT,” is an innovative model first debuted in 1988 in Memphis, Tennessee. As mental health professionals, Director Renee Carrillo and her team at Oaks work with police and other partners to help reduce potentially harmful encounters between law enforcement and those with mental illness. Key elements of the program are educating police department personnel about how to handle these encounters, deescalating possibly tense or dangerous situations, and helping them find ways to cope with the stress and trauma they experience as part of their work. [...]