Delta officers train at DSU to handle mental health crises

Officers from across the Mississippi Delta spent the week at Delta State University learning how to slow down mental-health calls before they turned into arrests, injuries or a deeper crisis. The Mississippi Delta Crisis Intervention Team Academy met at the Baioni Conference Center in Broom Hall on the Cleveland campus, where the focus was de-escalation, communication and a safer first response.

The 40-hour course covered mental-health diagnoses, medications, substance use issues and de-escalation techniques. The Mississippi Department of Mental Health says the model is designed to divert people in crisis from arrest and connect them with treatment and support services, a shift that matters in Cleveland and Bolivar County when officers are the first to reach someone in distress, whether the call involves psychosis, addiction, a domestic conflict or trauma.

The training sits inside Mississippi’s Collaborative Response to Mental Health Act, House Bill 1222, passed in 2023. The law required every county and municipal law enforcement agency to have at least one CIT officer by July 1, 2025, and set a second deadline of July 1, 2031, for all county and municipal officers to complete Mental Health First Aid training. By the end of June 2025, about 96% of required departments had a trained CIT officer on staff, and the state had held 46 CIT classes that trained nearly 668 officers over two years.

For state officials, success is measured on the street: fewer arrests, fewer re-arrests, fewer officer injuries and fewer calls that escalate to specialized teams. Wendy Bailey, the mental health department’s executive director, has pushed agencies to prioritize CIT and Mental Health First Aid because people in crisis deserve a compassionate and effective response, not a trip to jail when treatment is the better answer.

Mississippi has also built a leadership development class for law-enforcement executives, covering the history of the 40-hour certification, quality standards, recruitment, retention and community engagement. At Delta State, the academy showed how the university has become a regional hub for public-safety training, and how much now depends on whether officers can turn classroom lessons into calmer outcomes on Cleveland streets.