Video simulation to help train police to deal with mentally ill

Orange County law enforcement agencies will soon have a new tool to help them deal with a mentally ill person in a potential crisis.

In July, the Criminal Justice Training Center at Golden West College in Huntington Beach will launch a component of its voluntary Crisis Intervention Training program that uses an interactive video to teach officers how to respond to various types of mental illnesses and defuse tense situations by talking.

The training program, developed by Golden West and taught at the Orange County Sheriff’s Academy, began in 2008 as a lecture course that teaches officers how to identify mental illnesses and developmental disabilities.

With more than 3,000 police officers from Los Angeles and Orange counties having completed the class, Ron Lowenberg, dean of the Criminal Justice Training Center, said he was looking for a way enhance the training.

“Scenario training has become so popular and officers love it,” said Lowenberg, a former Huntington Beach police chief and current interim chief of police in Costa Mesa. “They already know they get a lot from that training, so when we heard about the interactive training using the simulator, our eyes lit up.”

Lowenberg said the Costa Mesa, Newport Beach and Irvine police departments have used Golden West’s training in the past and that he expects they will use the new simulator as well.

After the lecture course, officers will have the opportunity to use their classroom training in the video simulation stationed at Golden West. They will be presented one of eight scenarios and will have to ask questions to determine whether the person in the video is a threat.

Seal Beach police Cpl. Dave Barr, an instructor in the training program, said the lecture and video components will be available only to active officers for now, though Golden West is looking into making the program a requirement for academy trainees.

Barr and Scott Whyte, a training consultant for the justice center, ran through a scenario in which a store owner reported that a man was in an alley being a nuisance.

As Barr asked questions of the man in the video, Whyte sat at a nearby computer queuing up the man’s responses. After about five minutes of talking, Barr learned that the man had just gotten out of jail and needed medication for bipolar disorder. Instead of placing the man on a psychiatric hold, Barr told him he would take him to a clinic to get help.

“You don’t want to find yourself in a position, as an officer, trying to create more than what is there,” Barr said.

The Crisis Intervention Training program is funded by the Orange County Health Care Agency and is offered to law enforcement agencies at no charge, Lowenberg said.

“The demand for something like this is huge,” he said. “Everybody from police chiefs down to rookie police officers understands the value of this kind of training.”

Staff writer Jeremiah Dobruck contributed to this report.