JACKSON — The celebration was small, but the impact is likely to be large. On Friday, Jan. 26, nine local law enforcement officers who work in Hinds County graduated from week-long mental-health training to help them on the job.
Crisis Intervention Team training, or CIT for short, is an intensive program. Officers heard from professionals, learning about mental-health disorders, specific illnesses and how treatment works. They also learned de-escalation techniques and tools to use when confronting a person having a mental-health crisis, which can escalate into deadly encounters if handled poorly.
On the last two days, the graduates ran through live-action scenarios to practice what they learned. Hinds County sheriffs, Jackson Police Department officers, and several college campus and other police officers in the Jackson-Hinds area trained last week, as well as a handful of Mississippi Department of Corrections staff members…