Amy Watson, an assistant professor at the Jane Addams College of Social Work at the University of Illinois at Chicago, researches the interface of the mental health and criminal justice systems and factors influencing how individuals with mental illness are processed by these systems.
She currently has federal funding for several studies examining police response to persons with mental illness, including a study of the Chicago Police Department’s Crisis Intervention Team program.
Watson is an active member and former project director of Chicago Consortium for Stigma Research, an interdisciplinary group of researchers dedicated to studying mental illness stigma, its consequences and strategies for attitude change. Prior to her research career, Watson worked as a probation officer, specializing in offenders with serious mental illness. She also spent several years as a mitigation specialist, conducting psychosocial investigations for death penalty cases. She was recently awarded the John M. Davis, MD Researcher of the Year Award from the National Alliance on Mental Illness of Greater Chicago.
Presentation: Improving Police Response to Persons with Mental Illness: Evaluating Chicago’s Crisis Intervention Team Model
Fueled by the awareness that police officers are often the first responders to persons experiencing mental crises and the gatekeepers to the criminal justice and mental health systems, jurisdictions across the country are implementing programs to improve police departments’ capacities to effectively, respectfully and safely interact with persons with mental illness.
The best known and most rapidly disseminating approach is the Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) model. The CIT model, a systems level intervention, includes officer training, as well as organizational shifts in priorities and collaboration with community service providers. In this presentation, Watson will discuss the challenges of conducting methodologically rigorous research in this applied setting and report the findings of CIT’s impact on call safety and call dispositions, as well as officer and police district-level factors influencing the effectiveness of the intervention.
