The Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) model is designed to improve the outcomes of interactions between law enforcement personnel and individuals with mental illness. When individuals with mental illness are experiencing a psychiatric crisis or are acting out as a result of a mental illness, CIT works by diverting them to appropriate mental health services and supports rather than to the criminal justice system. CIT provides training to law enforcement personnel on preventing psychiatric crises and deescalating a crisis when it occurs, without the unnecessary use of physical force. However, CIT is not just a training program.

CIT programs are only effective when law enforcement personnel, the community mental health system, consumer and family advocates, and other stakeholders collaborate to help ensure that when officers divert an individual, the treatment system is willing and able to provide appropriate services. Until recently, CIT training focused primarily on addressing the needs of adults, although trained officers have also long responded to calls involving youth in psychiatric crises. Adult CIT has three key components:

• A community collaboration between mental health providers, law enforcement personnel, family and consumer advocates, and other stakeholders. Representatives from these stakeholder groups form a steering committee or advisory group. They examine local systems to determine their community’s needs, agree on strategies for meeting those needs, and organize training for law enforcement personnel. This committee also determines the best way to transfer people with mental illness from police custody to the community mental health system and ensures that there are adequate services for triage.
• A 40‐hour training program for law enforcement personnel that includes basic information about mental illness, information about the local mental health system and local policies, interaction with consumers and family members to learn about their experiences, verbal de‐escalation techniques and strategies, and role‐playing.
• Consumer and family involvement in steering and advisory committees, coordinating training sessions, and leading training sessions.

The first CIT program was established in Memphis in 1988 after a police officer shot and killed a man with a serious mental illness. This tragedy prompted a collaborative effort between the police, NAMI Memphis, the University of Tennessee Medical School, and the University of Memphis to improve police training and procedures in response to calls involving individuals with mental illness. The Memphis CIT program has achieved remarkable success, in large part because it has remained a true community partnership.

Today, the so‐called “Memphis Model” CIT has been adopted by hundreds of communities in more than 40 states, and is being implemented statewide in several states. Building on the success of CIT programs for adults, several communities have started to adapt CIT programs for youth. Some of these communities are spotlighted in the next section and are utilized as case studies throughout this paper.