What Is a Crisis Intervention Team in Policing?
Updated September 17, 2026
A Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) is a community partnership between law enforcement, mental health providers, and people with lived experience of mental illness, built on the Memphis Model first developed in 1988. CIT-trained officers are one part of it: specially trained patrol officers who respond to psychiatric crisis calls aiming to connect someone with treatment.
If you patrol long enough, you’ll take a call where the person in crisis isn’t a criminal. They’re someone in a mental health episode who needs a hospital bed more than handcuffs. Crisis Intervention Team training exists to give you a way to handle that call differently. Here’s what CIT actually is, what the Memphis Model’s training covers, and what typically changes once you’re wearing the CIT pin.
Where the CIT Model Came From
In 1988, following the fatal police shooting of a Memphis, Tennessee man in a mental health crisis, the Memphis Police Department partnered with the local chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) and area mental health providers to build a different response to these calls. CIT International credits Sam Cochran and Dr. Randolph Dupont as co-founders of the resulting curriculum, known today as the Memphis Model. NAMI’s current CIT advocacy page puts the number of U.S. communities now running some version of it at more than 2,700, though that figure has appeared unchanged in NAMI’s materials for years, so treat it as a longstanding estimate rather than a precise current count.
CIT Is a Partnership, Not Just a Police Team
CIT International defines a Crisis Intervention Team program as a community partnership, not a unit inside a police department. Law enforcement, mental health and addiction professionals, people with lived experience of mental illness, and their families all have a seat at the table. CIT-trained patrol officers are the most visible piece, but the partnership behind them, the crisis centers, the referral pathways, the ongoing coordination, is what CIT International says actually makes a program work.
How the Memphis Model Trains and Selects Officers
The Memphis Model uses specially selected volunteer officers rather than assigning CIT duty to everyone coming out of the academy, and it targets roughly 20 to 25 percent of a department’s patrol force. That’s the original blueprint and a best-practice target, not a nationwide staffing requirement. Local and state programs adapt the model, so the volunteer structure and target percentage look different depending on where you’re applying.
Under Memphis Model best practices, selection favors officers who already handle high-stress calls calmly, though exact screening criteria vary by agency and program.
The Memphis Model’s training runs 40 hours, about one work week. CIT International’s curriculum leans heavily on mental health professionals, community partners, and people with lived experience of mental illness as instructors, working alongside law enforcement trainers, rather than excluding police instructors. Expect it to cover:
- Recognizing the condition: Bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, depression, PTSD, and the warning signs of suicide risk, taught largely by clinicians.
- De-escalation over command presence: Active listening techniques built to slow a crisis down instead of the verbal commands you’d use on a compliant suspect.
- The legal side: Your state’s legal standards and procedures for emergency psychiatric evaluation or detention, since the thresholds and terminology differ from state to state.
- Where to actually take someone: The community’s crisis centers, psychiatric ER capacity, and referral contacts, because a de-escalated call still needs somewhere to go.
- Role-play scenarios: Live scenes with trained actors playing the person in crisis, so the first time you use the skill isn’t on an actual call.
What Changes on an Actual Crisis Call
In some CIT programs, dispatch may route an identified behavioral-health crisis to a CIT-trained officer when one’s available, though whether that happens, and whether a CIT officer gets priority, depends on the local program. On scene, the training aims to shift priority from gaining compliance to buying time and de-escalating instead of moving toward force.
CIT International describes the broader goal as improving how the system responds to a crisis call and connecting people with treatment while reducing unnecessary criminal-justice involvement, not as a guarantee that every encounter ends at a hospital instead of a jail.
NAMI states that CIT in Memphis was associated with roughly an 80 percent reduction in officer injuries during mental health crisis calls. That figure describes the original Memphis program specifically, not CIT programs nationally.
What CIT Doesn’t Fix
CIT training doesn’t turn a short encounter into a full mental health evaluation, and it doesn’t replace co-responder programs that pair an officer with a clinician on scene. Adoption is also uneven across the country, and whether an officer with CIT training responds to your call at all still depends heavily on where you live.
If you’re standing up a program rather than joining an existing one, CIT International runs a certification process for CIT programs at the agency, regional, and state or provincial level, with tiers from Bronze through Platinum, plus a separate certification track for CIT coordinators. Certification recognizes programs operating with fidelity to the model. It isn’t a requirement to run a CIT program in the first place, and it’s a different thing entirely from any state’s police certification or licensing requirements, which are set independently.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a Crisis Intervention Team?
It’s a community partnership among law enforcement, mental health and addiction professionals, people with lived experience of mental illness, and their families, built on the Memphis Model developed in 1988. CIT-trained patrol officers are the piece most people actually see.
What does a CIT officer actually do on a call?
In programs that use dispatch routing, they respond to calls identified as a behavioral-health crisis and work to de-escalate the situation, aiming to connect the person with treatment resources instead of defaulting to an arrest. Exactly how that plays out depends on the local program.
How long is CIT training, and who teaches it?
The Memphis Model uses a 40-hour course, typically run over one work week. The curriculum draws heavily on mental health professionals and people with lived experience as instructors, alongside law enforcement trainers, though the exact mix varies by program.
Is CIT training required for police officers?
The traditional Memphis Model uses volunteer specialist officers rather than training everyone, but whether crisis intervention training is required at all varies by state, academy, and individual agency.
Does CIT training replace a mental health professional?
No. It’s meant to help officers recognize and de-escalate a crisis in the field long enough to connect someone with actual treatment, not to substitute for clinical care.
Key Takeaways
- Started in Memphis in 1988 – built by the Memphis Police Department with NAMI and area mental health providers; CIT International credits Sam Cochran and Dr. Randolph Dupont as co-founders.
- CIT is a community partnership, not just a police unit – law enforcement, clinicians, people with lived experience, and families are all part of the model.
- The original Memphis Model uses volunteer specialist officers; local and state training requirements vary.
- Training runs 40 hours under the Memphis Model – taught largely by mental health professionals and people with lived experience alongside police trainers.
- Adoption is still uneven nationally – and CIT International certification (Bronze through Platinum) recognizes programs that follow the model closely, but it isn’t a mandatory police licensing requirement.
If you’re weighing a role that puts you on the front line of these calls, patrol experience usually comes before specialty training like this.