26 AMERICAN POLICE BEAT: JUNE 2017 W W h e n i t comes to m e n t a l h e a l t h t r a i n i n g and de-escalation tactics, it’s amazing how quickly police officers in the field wind up using those new skills. Waseca Police Officer Jacob Kaplan recently at- tended crisis intervention training. He says he was on his first shift after the training when he got a chance to put his new skill set to the test. Kaplan was called to as- sist a suicidal man parked outside a hospital. Kaplan says the man was in rough shape. In fact, he was so distraught he was unable to go inside to ask for help from doctors – even though his girlfriend was begging him to do so. Kaplan put the training to work. He established con- tact, expressed sympathy and empathy and got the guy talking. Kaplan learned the man had a kid so he began to talk softly about how the child needed a father. These things take time but 45 minutes later the man walked into the ER to get some help. The suicidal man tracked down Kaplan about a week later and thanked him for saving his life. Kaplan and fellow officer Brent Brass say the training they got made all the differ- ence. Their boss, Capt. Kris Markeson, agrees. “This is the only training where officers have come to me independently and said, ‘I wish we could send everyone,’” Markeson told reporters with SouthernMin- nesota.com. “The more trained of- ficers we can have on staff the better chance an officer goes face-to-face with these people,” he continued. The good news is that in some places this critical training is being expanded. In fact all law enforcement personnel in Minnesota might soon be required to learn how to deal with peo- ple with mental illness and safely de-escalate crises. There’s bill being consid- ered by state lawmakers that would boost police training by $7 million, including mandatory training in cri- sis intervention, conflict management and cultural issues. “Officers need a better un- derstanding of how to defuse what are often tense situa- tions,” said Andy Skoogman of the Minnesota Chiefs of Police Association, which supports the bill. Better training for cops ain’t cheap but it’s worth every penny. “It is expensive training. The state needs to increase its investments – it can’t fall on all local government,” said Nathan Gove, execu- tive director of the Board of Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST), which licenses officers in the state’s 439 agencies and supports the bill. “Before this,” he said, “I probably dealt with people having a mental health crisis and I didn’t know it. I just didn’t know what to do.” Now other officers are learning from their col- leagues Kaplan and Brass. “Their attitude and ap- proach to these calls has rubbed off,” he said. “The information Jacob and Brent have had and how they treat these people has been very positive for everybody.” As more and more Americans find themselves in dire straights, there will be many oppor- tunities to put comprehensive police training to the test. This stuff works The truth is cops, most of them anyway, don’t really make that much money. So any time a law enforce- ment officer starts to look really tanned (unless they’re coming back from a vaca- tion) it generally raises a few eyebrows. In Indiana, Lake County Sheriff John Buncich has disciplined a Lake County deputy for working on his tan during work. Sheriff Buncich says he hit the officer with a 15-day suspension without pay and placed him on probationary status for six months. What did the kid do to get in so much trouble? “He was tanning,” Buncich told reporters for the North- west Times. Mark Back, a spokesman for the department, said Buncich ordered an investi- gation after rumors started flying around that the officer in question seemed to be spending a lot of time at a local tanning salon. Back said investigators determined that the officer had indeed visited a tanning establishment on several oc- casions when he was on duty. The officer is a veteran and has been with the department for more than 21 years. The tanning discipline was announced at the same time as two other officers were disciplined for getting into a fistfight with each other. Also hit with two-day sus- pensions were two officers that watched the fight but failed to report it. Hey – has anyone seen Richards? What happened to that cute guy that was always here? 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