CIT stands for Crisis Intervention Team, a 40-hour training program that teaches law enforcement officers how to recognize and respond to people experiencing mental health crises. The program is built on partnerships between police, mental health professionals, hospitals, and advocacy organizations, with the goal of connecting people in crisis to treatment rather than funneling them into the criminal justice system. More than 2,700 communities across the United States currently run CIT programs.
How CIT Training Started
The program traces back to a single deadly encounter in Memphis, Tennessee. In 1987, police officers responded to a call at a public housing complex where a young man was threatening people with a knife. When he refused to put it down, officers opened fire and killed him. He had a history of mental illness.
The aftermath pushed the city to rethink how police handled these situations entirely. Memphis’s mayor brought together advocates from the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), police leadership, community mental health professionals, university researchers, hospital administrators, and church officials. Together, they created what became known as the Memphis Model: a structured approach to training officers specifically for mental health calls. That model became the blueprint for CIT programs nationwide and, eventually, internationally.
What the 40-Hour Training Covers
CIT training is an intensive, weeklong program that goes well beyond a standard police academy lecture on mental health. Officers learn to recognize signs of specific psychiatric conditions, understand civil commitment laws, and identify local mental health resources they can connect people to in the field. The curriculum also covers professional liability issues that can arise during mental health encounters and clarifies the roles of different parts of the mental health system, from courts to hospitals to community providers.
One of the most distinctive elements is direct contact with people who have lived experience. During training, individuals with mental illness and their family members share personal stories with the officers. NAMI runs a formal program for this called Sharing Your Story with Law Enforcement, which prepares speakers to present their experiences in a way that resonates with a law enforcement audience. The goal is to build empathy and replace assumptions with real understanding of what a mental health crisis looks and feels like from the inside.
Beyond the core 40-hour course, many CIT programs offer specialized tracks: youth-specific training for encounters involving children and adolescents, veteran-focused training that addresses combat-related trauma and PTSD, advanced courses for experienced CIT officers, and refresher sessions to keep skills sharp over time.
De-escalation Skills at the Core
The practical heart of CIT training is de-escalation: the ability to calm a volatile situation using words, body language, and patience instead of force. Officers learn a structured set of techniques that start with managing their own stress response before addressing the person in crisis.
The first step is self-regulation. Officers practice focusing on their breathing, relaxing their body, and softening their gaze to keep their own fight-or-flight response from taking over. The reasoning is straightforward: a tense officer escalates a tense situation. From there, officers learn to adopt open, non-threatening body language. That means a relaxed stance with the body turned slightly to the side, hands visible and open, and steady but non-aggressive eye contact.
Verbal techniques follow a specific progression. Officers greet the person, use their name, and keep language simple and repetitive. When someone’s brain is flooded with fear or panic, processing complex information becomes harder, so short, consistent phrases work better than long explanations. Officers are trained to listen for the emotion underneath whatever the person is saying, because the story someone tells in crisis often has little to do with what they’re actually feeling. The real drivers are usually fear, a sense of disrespect, or a feeling of lost control.
Active listening is emphasized heavily: allowing silence, letting the person vent without interruption, asking clarifying questions, and validating the emotion they’re experiencing. When limits need to be set, officers learn to do it with calm, direct language that stays unemotional. A key tool is “when-then” framing: “When you put the object down, then we can talk about getting you some help.” This gives the person a sense of agency and a clear path forward rather than just a command.
Personal space also gets significant attention. Anxiety expands the invisible bubble of comfort around a person, so officers learn to move slowly, ask before entering someone’s space, stay clear of arms and legs, and sometimes recognize that the opposite side of the room is close enough.
The Partnership Model
CIT is not just a training course for individual officers. It’s designed as a community-wide system. The model requires active, ongoing collaboration between law enforcement agencies, mental health providers, hospital emergency departments, and advocacy organizations like NAMI. Each partner fills a specific role: hospitals and mental health agencies provide places officers can bring people in crisis for immediate evaluation and treatment, while advocacy groups contribute training expertise and lived-experience perspectives.
This network matters because the training itself only works if officers have somewhere to take people besides jail. A CIT officer who recognizes a psychiatric crisis but has no mental health facility willing to accept a walk-in at 2 a.m. is stuck. The community infrastructure, sometimes called a “no wrong door” approach, is what turns individual officer skills into system-level change. NAMI actively supports communities in building these partnerships, offering implementation guides and connecting local affiliates with law enforcement agencies looking to start or strengthen CIT programs.
What the Evidence Shows
Research consistently finds that CIT training improves officers’ knowledge of mental health conditions and increases their comfort and confidence when responding to crisis calls. Officers who complete the program report feeling better prepared to handle these encounters, and they show measurable gains in understanding psychiatric symptoms, available community resources, and legal frameworks around involuntary commitment.
The picture is more nuanced when it comes to harder outcomes like arrest rates and use of force. A comprehensive review published through the Office of Justice Programs concluded that while CIT appears to be a promising model, research has not yet conclusively proven that the programs reduce arrests or force during police encounters with people in mental health crisis. That doesn’t mean the programs fail on those measures. It means the studies conducted so far have limitations in design and scale that make definitive conclusions difficult. What is clearer is the shift in officer attitudes and approach: CIT-trained officers are more likely to see a mental health call as a situation requiring connection to services rather than enforcement.
Adoption Beyond the United States
The Memphis Model has spread internationally, though adapting it to different cultural and resource contexts requires careful work. In Liberia, for example, researchers developed a modified CIT curriculum after finding that law enforcement and mental health clinicians there identified incarceration and lack of treatment as the central problems, similar to the issues that prompted the original Memphis program but in a post-conflict setting with far fewer mental health resources.
To guide this kind of international expansion, researchers have developed a Global Expansion Protocol, a four-phase approach that includes analyzing the local system, training for cross-cultural communication, identifying key stakeholders, and evaluating the adapted program. The framework acknowledges that a program designed for American policing can’t simply be dropped into a different country. Local laws, cultural attitudes toward mental illness, and the availability of mental health services all shape what a CIT program needs to look like in practice.