What Research on Crisis Intervention Teams Tells Us and What We Need to Ask

Abstract

Developed over 30 years ago, the Crisis Intervention Team model is arguably the most well-known approach to improve police response to individuals experiencing mental health crisis. In this article, we comment on Rogers and colleagues' review (in this issue) of the CIT research base and elaborate on the current state of the evidence. We argue that CIT can be considered evidence based for officer level outcomes and call level dispositions. We then discuss the challenges that currently make it difficult to draw conclusions related to arrest, use of force, and injury related outcomes. More research, including a randomized, controlled trial is clearly needed. But we caution against focusing narrowly on the training component of the model, as CIT is more than training. We encourage research that explores and tests the potential of CIT partnerships to develop effective strategies that improve the mental health system's ability to provide crisis response and thus reduce reliance on law enforcement to address this need.