Indeterminate Effects of Crisis Intervention Teams on Law Enforcement Officer Shootings of People with Mental Illnesses

After the 1987 police shooting of a mentally ill Memphis man, the Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) model was developed to train police officers to better respond to similar cases. However, decades later, little research exists on the effectiveness of CIT programs to address that issue. Given the recent increase in attention to police shootings and a high rate of police interactions with mentally ill people, it is important to determine the effectiveness of the CIT model through evidence-based research. This article presents an empirical analysis of the impact of CIT programs on fatal police shootings of mentally ill individuals. The findings of this paper align with the consensus of limited existing scholarship that the impact of CIT programs is not statistically significant; however, the findings differ by indicating a marginal increase in the probability of shootings occurring in locations with CIT programs rather than having a reductive effect