文摘
The process of deinstitutionalization during the 1950s in the United States resulted in an increase in people with mental illness on the streets. It has been shown (Watson et al.,2010) that dispatches to police officers involving incidences of mental illness have become increasingly common occurrences among police departments in the United States since that time. Police officers are often first responders for people in psychological distress,so it has become common practice among many departments to train their officers to be better able to interact with people who have mental illnesses. Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) training was developed in Memphis,Tennessee,in 1988,(Compton,Broussard,Hankerson-Dyson,Krishan,& Stewart-Hutto,2011) as a result of a shooting by a police officer involving a person with a mental illness (Hanafi,Bahora,Demir,& Compton,2006). One of the main goals of CIT training is to keep mentally ill citizens out of the criminal justice system and to refer them to hospitals for proper mental health treatment (Watson et al.,2010). In order to address the gap in limited research involving emotional intelligence and levels of empathy after completion of the CIT program,this study aimed to investigate the differences between the levels of emotional intelligence in CIT-trained officers versus non CIT-trained officers. Results revealed that there were no statistically significant differences among police officers who are CIT trained compared to those who are not CIT trained with regard to their levels of emotional intelligence. However,it was found that males scored higher than females on a scale assessing identification of their own emotions,and that females scored higher than males on a scale assessing their ability to use emotions during problem solving.