A Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) is a partnership between law enforcement, mental health professionals, and community advocates designed to improve how police respond to people experiencing a mental health crisis. First established in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1988, the model trains officers to recognize psychiatric emergencies and redirect people toward treatment rather than jail. Roughly 2,700 CIT programs now operate across the United States, though that covers only a fraction of the country’s approximately 18,000 law enforcement agencies.
How the Memphis Model Works
The original CIT framework, known as the Memphis Model, is built around two core goals: keep everyone safer during a crisis encounter, and divert people with mental illness out of the criminal justice system and into healthcare. To reach those goals, the model relies on three categories of structural elements.
The first category is ongoing partnerships. A CIT program is not just a police training course. It requires active, sustained collaboration between law enforcement agencies, mental health providers, and advocacy groups that include people living with mental illness and their families. These partners jointly plan the program, set policies, and maintain community buy-in over time.
The second category covers day-to-day operations: which officers respond to crisis calls, how dispatchers identify and route those calls, who coordinates the program internally, what the training curriculum looks like, and which mental health facility serves as the receiving point for people who need emergency psychiatric care. The third category focuses on keeping the program alive long-term through evaluation, refresher training, officer recognition, and outreach to other communities interested in launching their own programs.
Who Is Involved
CIT programs extend well beyond the officers on the street. Dispatchers receive specialized training so they can flag mental health calls early and route them to CIT-trained officers. A dedicated CIT coordinator within the department manages training schedules, tracks outcomes, and serves as the liaison between law enforcement and mental health partners. Mental health clinicians staff the receiving facility and, in some departments, work alongside officers directly.
The Tucson Police Department, for example, operates a Mental Health Support Team made up of dedicated CIT officers whose sole job is responding to psychiatric crises, conducting proactive outreach, and serving court orders related to mental illness. Not every department has that level of specialization, but the general structure is similar: volunteer patrol officers complete a 40-hour training academy, and those officers become the first call when a dispatcher identifies a crisis situation.
What Officers Learn in Training
The 40-hour CIT academy covers mental health conditions, substance use disorders, de-escalation tactics, and the local mental health system. A significant portion focuses on communication skills that run counter to standard police training.
Officers learn to abandon what’s called “command presence,” the authoritative posture, bladed stance, and hands-on-weapons positioning that can read as aggression to someone in a psychiatric crisis. Instead, they practice slowing down, introducing themselves by name, using the person’s name, and speaking in short, simple sentences. The training emphasizes being a visible source of calm: reducing background noise, removing bystanders who may be escalating the situation, avoiding sudden movements, and letting one person talk at a time.
Specific verbal techniques include asking open-ended questions (while avoiding “why,” which can feel accusatory), paraphrasing what the person says to show they’re being heard, and using “I” or “we” statements rather than commands. Officers are taught never to challenge or validate delusions or hallucinations, but instead to keep the person focused on the present moment. For someone who is confused or disoriented, the goal is grounding them in the here and now. For someone who is angry, the approach shifts to listening, deflecting, and diffusing. For someone who seems desperate, the priority is instilling hope and making a personal connection.
Officers also learn to telegraph their intentions, telling the person what’s about to happen before it happens, and to offer choices rather than issuing orders. The training explicitly warns against being condescending, sarcastic, or dishonest, and against pretending to share the person’s feelings.
Impact on Use of Force
One of the clearest differences between CIT-trained and non-trained officers shows up in escalating situations. In a study published in Schizophrenia Bulletin, researchers presented officers with three increasingly tense scenarios involving a person with schizophrenia. In the first two scenarios, both groups responded similarly. But in the most intense scenario, the groups diverged sharply: 63% of non-CIT officers chose a physical response (grabbing, using pepper spray, striking, or using a baton), compared to 43.5% of CIT-trained officers. The average CIT officer’s preferred response at that stage was verbal negotiation, while the average non-CIT officer’s preferred response was physical restraint.
Diversion to Mental Health Services
The original reports from Memphis showed that CIT reduced arrests and increased the number of people transported to psychiatric care voluntarily rather than in handcuffs. Later research across four Chicago police districts confirmed that CIT-trained officers directed people to mental health services more often than their non-trained counterparts, with 68% of crisis encounters ending in a mental health referral for CIT officers compared to 48% for non-CIT officers.
There’s an important catch, though. That diversion effect depended heavily on whether the surrounding community actually had mental health resources available. In Chicago districts with strong mental health infrastructure, CIT training made a dramatic difference. In districts with fewer resources, CIT-trained officers performed about the same as untrained officers because there simply wasn’t anywhere to send people. This finding underscores a core principle of the Memphis Model: the program only works as well as the mental health system it connects to.
Financial Impact
CIT programs cost money to run, but they tend to pay for themselves. One cost analysis found that a department handling roughly 2,400 CIT calls per year spent about $2.4 million annually on officer training, emergency psychiatric evaluations, hospitalizations, and the small number of arrests that still occurred. But the same program generated an estimated $3.5 million in savings through shorter or avoided hospitalizations, fewer inpatient referrals from jails, and reduced booking and jail costs. That works out to roughly $1 million in net savings per year for a single department.
Limitations and Context
CIT is the most widely adopted crisis response model in American policing, but it has real boundaries. The arrest reduction that Memphis initially reported has not been consistently replicated in other cities. One Chicago study found no significant effect of CIT training on arrest rates at all. The model also depends on officers volunteering for the training, which means not every shift or district will have a CIT officer available when a crisis call comes in. Departments track what’s called “district saturation,” the percentage of officers trained, and outcomes improve as that number climbs.
CIT is also not the only model in use. Some departments pair officers with licensed mental health clinicians who respond together to crisis calls, an approach known as co-response. Others have created civilian-only crisis teams that handle certain mental health calls without any police presence. CIT remains the most common framework, but it represents one point on a spectrum of approaches that communities are using to rethink how emergency services interact with people in psychiatric distress.