Police outline progress in mental health training

Effort stems from fatal shooting of Dontre Hamilton in a park

Three years ago, Mayor Tom Barrett and the Milwaukee Police Department renewed a promise to ramp up mental health training for officers in the wake of the fatal shooting of Dontre Hamilton in Red Arrow Park.

It’s a promise kept.

As of Jan. 1, all officers have received the Crisis Intervention Team training, a 40-hour specialized course that teaches police how to identify a person struggling with mental illness and how to respond. Officers learn how to de-escalate a tense or dangerous situation and are taught about the side effects of medications.

“I hope that not only are they trained, but that they actually use their training in their day-to-day,” said Maria Hamilton, Dontre’s mother.

The Hamilton family pushed for the enhanced training after Hamilton, 31, was shot and killed April 30, 2014, by a Milwaukee police officer.

Hamilton, who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, was sleeping in Red Arrow Park that afternoon when employees at the nearby Starbucks called police to complain.

Two officers checked on him twice and found he was doing nothing wrong.

Another officer, Christopher Manney, responded, woke him up and a confrontation ensued, in which Manney said Hamilton took his baton, prompting him to shoot Hamilton 14 times. Manney was not criminally charged in the shooting. He was fired for violating police procedures on pat-downs but not for his use of force.

In December 2014, Barrett announced the department’s more than 1,800 officers would receive the 40-hour CIT training.

He said he made his decision at the urging of the Hamilton family.

“The Hamilton family was a fierce advocate for this and when I listened to them, I agreed with them that we need to have our police officers better trained and we continue to need our police officers to be better trained,” Barrett said in a recent interview. “There’s more work to be done,” he said. Barrett’s actions fulfilled a pledge he and then-Police Chief Nanette Nannette Hegerty made in 2004 in response to a similar police shooting.

A report from the Mental Health Task Force, which they served on, promised all officers would be trained in mental health to improve their crisis intervention skills. At the time, all officers got just four hours of training.

The extra training cost about $1.2 million — $500,000 was covered by a grant from the Greater Milwaukee Foundation.

“We made it a priority within the police department’s budget,” said Barrett, who thanked the foundation for its support.

That decision has made Milwaukee a national leader in mental health training for its police force.

The Police Department, which declined an interview request for this article, anticipates all supervisors will have CIT training by the end of this year, according to a report on the city’s Fire and Police Commission website.

The department is developing an advanced CIT course for officers who have voluntarily requested it, and the course will serve as continuing education, the report says.

Since late 2014, all new recruits have gotten the 40-hour training while in the academy.

“One of the main things CIT provides is increased safety for all people involved, for officers, for patients,” said Tony Thrasher, medical director for the crisis services division at the Milwaukee County Behavioral Health Division.

“From an individual basis, many officers have expressed how helpful it was,” he said.

Nate Hamilton said the Coalition for Justice, an advocacy group he co-founded after his brother’s death, wants to survey officers and people they have responded to in mental health situations to see how effective the training has been.

“I want to ask officers how they feel about it,” he said. “What did they gain, was it helpful or not?

“I think knowledge is power and you want to be knowledgeable of all scenarios that can play out when doing police work,” he said. “I hope the CIT training wasn’t a hindrance on them but more of an enlightenment.”