Humboldt County Grand Jury
• 2015-2016
• Agency Response
City of Rio Dell*
⚠️ Translation Notice: This content has been automatically translated. The original English text is the official version. Translation may contain errors.
⚠️ Este contenido ha sido traducido automáticamente. El texto original en inglés es la versión oficial. La traducción puede contener errores.
Findings and Recommendations 4 findings
F1
Page 1
The four-day CIT program takes officers out of the field for a significant period of time and may leave smaller agencies too short-staffed to be effective in their communities.
Related Recommendations (1)
R1
Page 1
The Humboldt County Civil Grand Jury recommends that County law enforcement agencies work with mental illness stakeholders (clients, families and advocates) and the Humboldt County Department of Health and Human Services to create and offer consistent, comprehensive, relevant and culturally-sensitive crisis intervention and de-escalation training program.
F2
Page 1
Repeated turnover of staff within the Mental Health Branch of the Department of Health and Human Services has negatively impacted their ability to offer the local CIT program RESPONSE: The Rio Dell Police Department agrees with the findings (F1, F2), and is very willing to work with stakeholders and HCDHHS in the area of crisis intervention and participate in locally offered training. While it is true that we are a small department and it is difficult to get officers to training, we have considered CIT training a priority and have participated in the past, to the extent that when the training was previously available every member of the department had completed the training. This
Related Recommendations (1)
R2
Page 2
The Humboldt County Civil Grand Jury recommends that all County crisis intervention and de-escalation training programs be available to all Sheriff's Office and municipal police department dispatchers Countywide.
F3
Page 2
In crisis situations, public safety may rest on first contact with dispatchers, yet recently enacted California Senate Bill 11 standardizes de-escalation/mental illness training for law enforcement personnel does not include the training of dispatchers. RESPONSE: Agree with the recommendation. While the Rio Dell Police Department does not directly employ dispatchers, we receive those services contractually through the Fortuna Police Department and we would support dispatcher participation in crisis intervention training. This recommendation will not be implemented by our department because it is not reasonable as we do not directly employ any dispatchers.
Related Recommendations (1)
R3
Page 2
The Humboldt County Civil Grand Jury recommends that some continuing education course on interactions with persons with mental, behavioral, substance use or intellectual disabilities be offered regularly for every dispatcher and every law enforcement officer who is assigned to patrol duties or who supervise patrol officers in the County.
F4
Page 2
The Eureka Police Department is to be commended for taking the initiative in designing the new De-escalation Intervention Response Training (DIRT). RESPONSE: The Rio Dell Police Department agrees with this recommendation and will participate as needed with this type of training. This recommendation has not yet been implemented, however we will participate as soon as this of training is available. Our Supervisors and Field Training Officers will participate in this training prior to June 30, 2017. Respectfully, Graham Hil Chief of Police
No recommendations for this finding
* This report's PDF did not contain easily extractable text and required Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for analysis. There may be minor errors in the extracted findings and recommendations due to OCR limitations with scanned documents.