An evaluation of Crisis-Intervention Team (CIT) training

Police officers in the United States are most often the first responders to a mental health crisis. The most popular training method for these responses among US police departments is crisis-intervention team (CIT) training. This paper provides the first estimates of the causal effect of CIT training on a police officer's propensity to use force and make an arrest. I implement a difference-in-differences framework using future trainees as controls to compare officer use of force and arrest of trained officers to those of untrained officers. I do not find a statistically significant effect of CIT training on either use of force or propensity to arrest