CIT Presentation:
Buncombe County Commissioners

Thank you for your continued support of CIT. Rich shared some numbers with you. Let me tell you a story behind those numbers.

Recently, I was talking to a mother who told me she called 9-1-1 last summer when her son became suicidal.

Her son, we'll call him Jeremy, was 23 years old - very strong and prone to depression and fits of rage ever since he hit his head in a car wreck five years before.

This particular evening, Jeremy was despondent and about 11 o'clock, he called a suicide hot line.

The counselor he was speaking to asked to talk to his mother and told her that, by law, she was required to inform the local authorities that Jeremy was threatening to kill himself.

Jeremy's mother encouraged the counselor to continue talking to her son so she could make the call to 9-1-1 and warn the dispatcher that her son had not had a good relationship with law enforcement in the past.

When the officers arrived, they knocked gently, went inside and asked Jeremy what was going on. One of the officers, a recent graduate of the CIT program, sat down and for the next 20 minutes, talked to Jeremy about what had brought him to that point in his life.

When the young man told the officer about his past experience with law enforcement, the officer responded, and I quote: "I'm sorry to hear that. I want you to promise me if you ever need anything, you'll give me a call."

Jeremy had been hospitalized in the past, and like his previous encounters with law enforcement, his hospitalization hadn't gone well. But when the CIT officer asked if he would be willing to go to the hospital and talk to a doctor that evening, Jeremy agreed.

The officers followed Jeremy and his mother and seeing they arrived safely, left with a few parting words for him: "Just remember, we're here if you need us."

Little did they realize then how quickly they would be called on to help Jeremy again.

At the hospital, a doctor saw Jeremy and told him he needed to be evaluated in the psychiatric unit. Fearing another admission, Jeremy ran out the door of the ER, jumped in his car and took off, leaving his mother, distraught, standing in the waiting room.

He hadn't gone far when an officer from the Buncombe County Sheriff's Office who'd been stationed in the ER and who, coincidentally, also had graduated from the CIT program pulled him over.

The two officers who'd originally gone to Jeremy's home heard the call on their radio and responded, too. When they arrived, they talked to Jeremy while the officer who had pursued him went back to the Emergency Room to pick up his mother.

The CIT officer was able to convince Jeremy to return to the hospital. He stepped out of his own vehicle and allowed the officer to handcuff him and put him in the back of his patrol car. Noticing Jeremy had cut his wrist, the officer took him out of the car, loosened the cuffs and Jeremy climbed back in.

Jeremy spent a week in the hospital and was discharged with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. He received the medicine he needed, got hooked up with a doctor and has been able to manage his illness for nearly a year.

All these months later, his mother's voice still cracks when she talks about that night. She said, and I quote, "I was so afraid our son would hurt himself or the officer. CIT is an amazing program."

CIT IS an amazing program, and Rich and I are proud of how far it's come in such a short time - 105 graduates representing seven counties.

The program your support helped create has become a model for the entire region. But we've still got work to do.

Rich and I serve on a State CIT Advisory Committee and committee members recently conducted a self-evaluation of their own programs. Ours got high marks on three of the four criteria - collaboration between partners, the creation of a special 40-hour training, and the collection and use of data to inform decision-making.

But the area where we didn't fare as well was infrastructure  -  in other words, ensuring that an adequate system of crisis services is available to support CIT.

Our community continues to need a 24/7 emergency mental health receiving facility where an officer can drop off a person who is mentally ill and in crisis, so the officer doesn't find himself sitting in a hospital ER for two or three hours waiting with the patient. A drop-off facility would allow patients to get the care they need and officers to return to their job of keeping our community safe.

If there's anything you can do in working with Mission to support that request, it would be appreciated - by the officers, by the patients, and by family members who love people with serious mental illnesses.

Again, thank you for your past support. Rich and I would be happy to answer any questions you may have.