are so many times where we want to know how police are trained what we're going to find out tonight i would sooner or the executive director of the washington state criminal justice training commission tonight on public exposure welcome so thank you for having me you know it's been quite some time and you're the sheriff at the time of king county and we're glad to have you back because there's there's lots of things more than just police training but i guess so much connects with that absolutely so tell us a little bit about what you do well i think i have the best job in the world right now i have all of the interesting challenging aspects of public safety but i'm in the training phase of it so it's a very positive environment and we have the opportunity to look at what's needed out in the field and then adjust our training accordingly so our things in police training changing or are they saying the same are you doing the same things that they did fifty years ago or absolutely not that's the best part of this job is i can take what i've learned over the last thirty two years in law enforcement and now i can apply it to what do we need a police officer to know coming out of the police academy same thing with our corrections officers that are working in jails they have a critically important role as well because they're interacting with the same people and they can have a real influence on those folks so you're not just police on the street you're also over the people who handle jails to jails probation officers all kinds of criminal justice professionals and no offense but you said that's the best job in the world that's a huge job it's a huge job but it's challenging and i feel like i'm doing something that really matters and is genuinely going to improve safety in the community when you are sheriff of king county something that you talked about an awful lot was handling those who were the most vulnerable in society the mentally ill substance abuse people as well in a different way yes because that's something that's still of interest here absolutely and we have such a great opportunity  at the training center to teach police officers and corrections officers to recognize the behavior that they're seeing on the street and understand the best way to deal with it thirty years ago this kind of training was was rarely done and police officers were taught all of the physical tactics to take somebody under control cuff them up and take them to jail now we have extensive training about understanding people with mental illness what their behavior means how to deal with them how to deescalate and as we've talked about earlier in king county we have a lot of options now for dealing with people who suffer from mental illness other options besides jail well let's actually let's let's talk right about that because here in seattle we we've had something horrific happen short time ago where i was someone who was apparently mentally ill an adult child who was mentally ill and killed six people at the same point in time there's some statistics of mental illness in the criminal justice system today that at least two hundred eighty three thousand was tuning excuse me eighty four thousand inmates are identified here in the united states  having a mental illness why are they in jail because that is that's the only place that can say no we have we have cut services so dramatically across the board that our western sta hospital where where we treat people that suffer from mental illness they have a very limited capacity to take people in the seventy's this country made a decision as a society that we were no longer going to institutionalize people with mental illness except in the most extreme cases the thought was they need to be treated in the community that's a more effective place to treat them it's a great theory the problem was no money followed and so now what we've done is we have deals to to tional ised the treatment of mental illness unfortunately we have really institutionalized those folks in jail because when their behavior begins to impact other people there is no other option for them in most cases than jail well only place they can say no well i you know it's interesting and in fact actually i think what we're going to do is we're going to go to the clip right now because we did an interview on public exposure with whi we asked him lots of questions but one of them was about you know what did you do what kind of help did you try to get let's go to that clip right now you were quoted in the newspaper and i think several news blogs are saying that you wish you had lied yet so that you could have gotten him help all the pops and say he was going to kill me and that still works so whilst awake he said he wished he had lied and he wished that he had done something that could have gotten his son picked up by  by police my heart goes out to him i completely understand why he says that you know i mean i've advocated it but i absolutely understand that the laws are very very restrictive about what it takes to take somebody into custody against their will and we have had some changes in washington state law but they haven't been implemented because we don't have adequate funding to follow through if we in voluntarily commit someone so i think we have recognized as a community that the bar is too high too in voluntarily commit somebody but we have not committed the money that's necessary to do the follow through treatment one of the another statistics that is just alarming is for those people who have a mental illness and they're in there inside the criminal justice system there are incidents of suicide goes way up i that i believe that i mean that that sounds right to me because they don't have the the capacity to deal with the difficulties of jail which is for many people could and i would expect well i think you could put somebody in a jail setting that was perfectly mentally healthy and by the time they were done being locked up i think their mentally their mental health would be severely damaged or jails the worst possible place to treat somebody suffering from mental illness so what do we do as a society where we have to make some hard decisions and we have to make some hard commitments to what it's going to take this is an extremely difficult problem to to deal with because you have both the medical challenges but you also have constitutional challenges you have civil rights you can't take a thirty year old person and as a government take control of their lives without a very very clear reason and i think that's the difficult balance i think it's what makes it so heart wrenching for families with adult children that suffer from mental illness because the families can see so clearly what needs to be done but they can't force it well in the case of mr  article a desperate plea from the father of the cafe racer killer but here was something it was very interesting about this specific case is this is out of the west seattle herald where the article was with a hairdresser who had seen him that day and she said this she said he took out twenty dollars and he said is this enough and i said it's more than enough i only term your beard harold take twenty dollars he was just a walk in customer he was so calm he seemed nice to me i didn't know if he if you'd actually little weird i would know  then when he went outside he seemed like he didn't know which way he was going to go and this was after he had already killed some people how do you what do you choose to do to teach police officers  corrections officers as well how to deal with this well the the difficulty with this to ricky case is it is such an anomaly truly when you look at the breadth of people who live with mental illness most people who have mental illness are not dangerous they're no more likely to hurt somebody than a person who doesn't suffer from mental illness but that may choose to do something violent and there are no hard and fast rules that if you see this this and this then you can expect that person is going to blow up and commit a crime for most people that live with mental illness their behavior there are signs that you can recognize family members are very good at recognizing those signs and they're very good at recognizing when the when the situation is becoming more volatile we can train police officers to recognize some of those behavioral signs but a situation like insta wiki is such an outlier that i don't it's almost like a lightning strike you can't set all of your rules and do all your training to that situation you need to train to the bulk of people living with mental illness that we come into contact with so the likelihood that there was nothing that we can do or could have done then or society could have done i mean is that true or well that we could up i in i think given given the family situation probably not to be very honest with you and in an ideal world i'm sure  that his family knew that there were there were problems early on but they didn't know what to do in an ideal world teachers in the classroom would have recognized this behavioral science the family would have been referred to treatment there would have been resources to treat there's a lot of things that in hindsight you can say gee if we had only done all these things one thing that we do know about mental illness is early in her mention and treatment oftentimes can get people on the right road one of the most impactful people that i have learned about living with a mental illness from is randy revelle he's pretty well known in king county he suffers from a serious mental illness he is an example of a person who got early intervention not because the laws were set up for it but because he had a very smart and powerful father that forced the issue and was able to get randi into treatment in a timely way and he has a tremendous support network and he has been an absolute gem in our community the things that he has done he is such a valuable contributing member and i think he stands as an example of what we can do as a society if we are prepared to to make the correct diagnosis if we are prepared to make sure the person gets treatment and support i there are other insta we kids out there of course there are thankfully i think their numbers are very small unfortunately when something awful like this happens people look at that as oh that's what it means to suffer from mental illness that is the anomaly we have thousands of people in king county many of them living on the streets that are homeless that suffer from mental illness they are not dangerous they are vulnerable and they are much more likely to become victims of crime than to commit crimes when you look out and you see a person who's homeless  a lot of people who don't understand mental illness and substance abuse will look at people and say why doesn't this guy just get a job you know he looks physically healthy but his brain doesn't work you know if you have a car that is the computer runs your car if the computer goes haywire the car doesn't work right it might drive sometimes the right direction but sometimes not and and it's very difficult a person who suffers from a mental illness you can't really see the disability and so we become judge mental about the behavior when in fact in most cases it's a chemical biological problem just like diabetes or high blood pressure and there is an article in the federal way mirror so it's taking a barstool to a gunfight that the flaws in at the cafe racer there was someone who was being called a hero when he hears he through a store yes but how do we keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn't have them who are mentally ill you know i don't i don't know that there is a magic cure to that we guns are everywhere in our community and we have a lot of gun laws we don't have adequate resources to even enforce the gun laws that we do have and to have a gun law that is restrictive enough to to be able to foreshadow someone like ian stewart keep he would not have been prohibited from getting a gun permit so by the time you write the laws to be restrictive enough to keep people with a serious mental illness who may become violent from having guns it's so restrictive that we can't we can't enforce it and we can't deal with it what does that say about society  people who are the most vulnerable homeless and mentally ill otherwise are ones who we simply won't take care of unless they are become part of the criminal justice system right i think it's that says it's not good i mean it's it doesn't speak well of our society that we turn turn the other way now in king county we i think have done a much better job than most communities i think the recognition of an appropriate strategy for dealing with mental illness with homelessness think we do it better than most places in the country but we still have a long way to go and it's a very complicated problem and it's very resource intensive to fix it there are some people that will need supportive housing and treatment their entire lives it's very very expensive we're almost a broke site here right now have to run for it well i think we can't afford not to do it because the alternative is they will eventually you know given and given the right set of circumstances for sure end up in jail and the damage that they may do along the way when they have completely come unraveled you know pay now or pay later i would rather pay for someone to be in support of housing and getting treatment than to pay for them to be in prison for the rest of their lives let's go to another aspect of this it's not necessarily mental illness or maybe it is the headline is a decade of war pushes p t s d to the forefront in health care concerns this is this was june twenty seventh of two thousand and twelve and this is actually quoting people inside the united states military saying while it is common consensus that these individuals should be afforded treatment they are far too often shun from society and viewed as outcast a stigma associated with p t s d that has been difficult to break the contradiction is similar to one offering the homeless a helping hand without touching them and then this is something else says the the diagnostic and statistics manual says that what should happen when a person is going from it with a traumatic event they should be horrified helpless and frees but soldiers don't do that when they're in combat and they see things their training kicks in and they go on autopilot and they function the reason that i bring this up is no we here have more military retirees than probably anywhere else in the nation right here in our area and that's a source of sometimes difficulty to the criminal justice system isn't it absolutely that's why we are putting tremendous research resources into training police officers how to deal with people who are suffering from p t s d we've developed a block of training for people who suffer from traumatic brain injury because this is a this is a very real problem and i expect this is going to continue to grow and it's very likely that police officers are going to be confronted with these kinds of challenges it's already happened i i know of many cases where we've had a person who is suicidal and  you know as an armchair psychiatry is it's very clear to me that the person is suffering from p t s d the good news is that we are giving better training to our police officers so that they are better equipped to deal with and help deescalate the person who is in crisis who is suicidal because there are some things you can do that can be very effective at the end of the day though there's got to be follow up treatment or it's going to they're going to cycle right back again is there federal legislation on this on yes on helping local communities deal with this i know that senator murray has been very active in doing that our state legislature has passed laws that direct us to ensure that police officers get training to deal with traumatic brain injury there are other federal laws that don't help us at all and one law that is that is a thorn in my side and i'm very frustrated with it's a medicaid policy  exclusion rule so if you have let's say you have a returning veteran who's suffering from p t s d and he acts out he commits a minor crime he gets booked into jail if he was qualified for medicaid which is the his lifeline housing and treatment once he gets booked into jail that gets suspended or terminated and so too they think they take his meds but his medication a way they take the funding for all of his medical treatment away now what happens though it's a catch twenty two because constitutionally we are required to provide treatment to people who are incarcerated so the first thing that happens is the responsibility for paying for the medical treatment switches from the federal government to the local government which in most cases doesn't have a very deep pocket to pay for that away and i got a back up here so first off we send this person to afghanistan right he he gets into a very difficult firefight on our behalf he comes back with a brain injury or with a brain injury that you don't know any has p t s d he gets in some kind of car wreck that kicks in his p t s d and we're taking care of him from a federal standpoint until and you know that car wreck and then all of a sudden everything gets dumped on the local community correct but the but there but there's an even worse thing that happens in that is once that person is released from jail it's very very difficult to get those medicaid benefits reinstated and so being medicaid eligible in most cases is critical to get supportive housing and treatment so now we've taken a person who may have some support network out there and we've cut off their lifeline now we've created a situation where he can't get the housing and treatment he needs we are creating a recipe for every citizen for this person to likely become much more mentally ill and likely to be moving more towards suicide just out of frustration and helplessness but often times from of the criminal justice standpoint i mean from what you've seen in over thirty years of being in this field suicide and homicide are oftentimes runs together absolutely so it's not just a danger to you know himself absolutely but as you said here's a person that has gone overseas and fought for his country and if he ends up committing suicide to me that's just as bad as a homicide absolutely it just it breaks my heart because here's a person who literally gave his life for his country it's just he didn't give it to lee got home but there are other brain injuries that are  football yes and you know and i'm not picking on football it's just that there's a huge recognition now that there are many many brain injuries as a result of contact info ball in another context sports are the symptoms often that you've seen from from your experience often the same for p t s d from military to football injuries they are and that's why it's so critical to have training for elite especially for the police officer on the street again there they may be the first person outside of the family or circle of friends who has called when things start to get out of control that's a pool of people that we can provide specific training to so they can look at the behavior talk to the family about behavior and help steer them toward the resources to say this person is an evil there's a chemical biological issue going on here they may there may be something we can do to treat this so when a police officer is called what do what are the what are the police officers options if even if the someone if if the person with p t s d or with a brain injury from football or whatever right has committed a minor crime  hasn't heard anybody but could well the good news is next month the crisis solutions center is getting ready to open up in king county and what this is it's a diversion center it allows police officers to make a judgment call and based on their training about the behavior they're seeing they have the option to take the person to the crisis center where there is a team of trained professionals who can help get that person directly into treatment the reason this is so important is once the person gets booked into jail once they are introduced to the criminal justice system all kinds of rules and processes come into play that are very expensive that sucks money out of the system i would rather not spend that money through the criminal justice process take that money and apply it to the treatment and that's really the thinking of the crisis diversion center you get the person more directly into the services that they really need my goal is sheriff was to keep the community safe and if the best way to do that was get somebody treatment why on earth would i want to put them in jail and i think most of our police officers really understand that now if we have somebody who's done something that's more violent or more dangerous they're going to have to go to jail but we still have mental health court and we have drug courts so there's still an option for them to get into the treatment they need but it's a little further down the road and it's a little more difficult once you're in the system i think i just heard yet another reason why it's so difficult to be a police officer it's complicated because you have so many judgement calls that you have to make and now you have to make another one you don't discard somebody up to jail you may take them somewhere else but you know i think it's better now because no police officer feels good about booking somebody in jail when they know they're really sick and they know that jail isn't going to fix the problem most police officers i know are very relieved to have a better option and they're there like me they want to solve the problem they want to fix the problem they want this person to be safe they want their family to be safe so it's a it's a great option to have in the overall scheme of things is this one of the biggest issues that you having in criminal justice dealing with people with either p t s d or mental illness or substance abuse it's a very very big problem if you look at the jail population particularly here in king county bookings for cry for crimes of all categories have gone down over the last several years booking for people who have suffered from a mental illness is escalating or get the problem is getting worse do you do you classify those with  the same with people with mental illness of those who are on the substance meth for example you know sometimes it's very difficult to separate those out because the it's a little bit of a chicken and egg issue many people who suffer from mental illness self medicate with alcohol with drugs with those sorts of things there are people that don't have a mental illness that started be using drugs and end up becoming mentally ill as a result of the interaction with the drugs the two problems are very intertwined and that's why having the crisis the diversion center there is very helpful because you have trained professionals who are able to make a better assessment of what's the primary problem here is the primary problem mental health mental illness is it substance abuse and there's so much overlap so how do you train a police officer to deal with all this well what you do is you provide training to be able to to recognize the behavior of the outward behavioral science of mental illness and then you teach them techniques to communicate to deescalate to recognize what you're doing what you don't want to create is what i call the cornered animal syndrome because then people do things that don't make sense we're learning and we're teaching our officers a lot about brain physiology and what happens when a person is feeling threatened and the police officers go is not to make the person feel threatened the goal is to try and get the person to recognize i am here to help you it's a very different strategy than what we trained cops to do thirty years ago thirty years ago it was command presence get in there and take control sometimes that's appropriate but when you're dealing with somebody who is in a in a mental health crisis that can be the absolute worst thing to do and so we talk about things like how you hold your hands that that conveys a message to someone and you can be as tickly safe by holding your hands this way and you're ready to engage in a fight if you have to but it's conveying to the person i'm here to help you and those little tiny things can make a big difference police forces in the seattle area have been through a very difficult past several years  in terms of losing their own the clemens gentleman who person there's no way in my mind that he was saying right but just just just because you're mental ill mentally ill doesn't mean you're not also evil and i think we have to remember that clemens in my opinion was evil and suffered from a mental illness so if i'm a parent and i've got an adult child how do i tell the difference i think parents know we know our children you have children i have children i think most parents know their heart most people who suffer from mental illness are not evil most people in our community are not evil some of them are we have fifteen seconds left so what's the solution to all of this we have to admit that we have a problem and we have to commit to putting an adequate amount of resources to the problem to fix it he can't put band aids on this so thank you very much for being with us there are some resources up on the screen that that if you have questions about this particular issue of dealing with mental illness for a loved one or and