After graduating from the Connecticut Police Academy, officers across the state are required to undergo training to be recertified every three years. In the interim, many departments offer additional training programs to keep their officers up-to-date and ahead of the curve, especially in the areas of de-escalation, community engagement and fair and impartial policing.

In the New London Police Department, Capt. Brian Wright said that officers are offered a variety of trainings based on their assignments and areas of interest, throughout their careers.

The department has placed an emphasis on training that helps officers address their implicit biases and focus on engaging with the community they serve — both main areas of study at the academy.

NLPD focuses not only on community engagement, Wright said, but on a term he prefers: "community wellness."

In addition to encouraging officers to establish relationships with people who live in the community, as well as with local organizations, Wright also wants them to address the needs of the community and work with the community to meet those needs.

"We want to take stock in what's going on with the community and focus on having an open dialogue and working together to address the community's needs," Wright said. "It's time that police and community become one."

It is no longer the role of police officers to merely enforce the law, he said, and he wants his officers to know that. "In this day and age of policing, if you make an arrest and move on, it's not going to cut it," he said. "And after this national movement, I think it's important that agencies focus on community wellness, not just community policing."

Officers do that, he said, by getting out in the community and interacting with the people they serve and protect and by orchestrating conversations with local community groups.

Immediately after seeing the video of George Floyd's death at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis, NLPD officials met over Zoom with local organizations and leaders to discuss community and police relations.

The department also reviewed and reissued its use-of-force policies after Floyd's death.

They did so, Wright said, "to make sure we didn't have any shortcomings and to make sure that all officers were at full understanding of the policy and were continuing to acknowledge and combat their implicit biases."

"Everyone who comes in contact with our agency should have that experience in a fair, impartial, equitable and objective manner, without consideration of their individual demographics," he said. 

Fair and impartial policing, Wright said, is an area of training that is constantly evolving. "You can never have too much fair and impartial policing training," he said.

The NLPD in 2001 was the first police department in New England to implement Crisis Intervention Team training, a model that originated in Memphis and now is used in more than 500 communities nationwide — including Ledyard, Waterford and Groton City.

Through the CIT program, police officers work closely with mental health clinicians to help community members with mental illness and individuals who are in crisis.

According to the CIT website, the program is meant to help officers recognize and respond to various behavioral health conditions, learn specialized de-escalation and communication tools and replace traditional police methods with creative approaches to mental health issues, including seeking medical treatment for a person rather than arrest.

CIT acts as a "community partnership" between police, mental health and addiction professionals and persons living with mental illness and addiction with the goal of helping officers establish relationships with mental health resources.

Ledyard police Chief John Rich co-chairs the Connecticut Alliance to Benefit Law Enforcement, or CABLE, a statewide program that oversees CIT training.

In CIT training, said Rich, officers receive 40 hours of training together with mental health clinicians. Then, the officers receive weekly visits from clinicians.

Every Friday, a clinician stops in Ledyard, Waterford and Groton City, he said. That clinician sits with officers and goes over all of their calls from the previous week. If there were any calls involving a person in crisis or with a mental illness or behavioral issue, the clinician and officer get in the car and pay that person a visit to follow up.

"They visit them and ask them questions like 'What happened when you left the hospital?' 'How are you making out?' 'Are there any services you need?' 'How can we help you?'" Rich said.

When officers are responding to a scene, CIT training helps them de-escalate a situation and understand effective communication strategies. "Whether it's somebody with mental health issues, in crisis, or just having someone who is having a bad day, the training in CIT is universal," Rich said. "It's all about calming things down, active listening, opening dialogue and communication and talking things back to the subject to ensure understanding, the goal is to minimize or eliminate the use of force in a situation."

De-escalation, he said, is "the common thread" that runs through this entire training.

Rich said that in Ledyard, about half the department is involved in CIT training and the goal is to have every officer trained soon.  New London, Groton City, Waterford and Mitchell College police have CIT training, and Rich has taken part in trainings with Mashantucket Tribal, Groton Town and Stonington police, he said.

CABLE runs training sessions several times a year with more spots opening up in August and November. Its training model is now expanding into Rhode Island, Rich said.

In Ledyard, the department has taken CIT and expanded it into its "special needs report" practice. This type of report can be filed about someone in the community who has a cognitive issue — whether they're on the autism spectrum or living with dementia, for example — with useful information about what they look like, what vehicles they have access to, what triggers them and what helps calm them down.

"We work with families and take the information because they're the ones who know what's going to help," Rich said. Then, if something happens that requires police to respond, "the officers have the information at their fingertips."

In Waterford, more than half of the department has received CIT training, with four more officers scheduled to attend in August.

Year round, Waterford Police Department officers are provided with continual training, undergoing quarterly arrest and control training and annual use-of-force policy reviews, Sgt. David Ferland said. The department also continually emphasizes the importance of community engagement.

"Officers are encouraged to foster positive relationships with the community they serve, as well as treat everyone respectfully," Ferland said. "WPD takes pride in our relationship with the community, as shown through many community events in which officers volunteer their time and engagements with the community."

Those events include a holiday toy and food drive, touch-a-truck events, open houses at the department and coffee-with-a-cop discussions, as well as Make-A-Wish events, birthday parades, K-9 demos and teaching challenges in elementary schools, and officers serve as guest instructors at Waterford High School.

The department also offers an Annual Citizen's Police Academy, in which community members take part in an 11-week program designed to engage community members with what the WPD does, Ferland said.

Some officers also are sent to further de-escalation training, such as "Verbal Judo De-escalation," which focuses on using words to de-escalate a situation when feasible rather than progressing to physical force. The department will be sending two officers to become de-escalation instructors in early November, Ferland said.

In Norwich, the city's police department began stressing de-escalation training three years ago. In March 2017 it launched a program to train officers more intensely on de-escalation tactics.

The program, Chief Patrick Daley said at the time, was meant to give officers proactive training in response to high-profile cases of police use of force across the country.

Three officers spent a few months being training in de-escalation, attending things like the Police Executive Training Forum on de-escalation in New Orleans and critical incident training hosted by the New York Police Department in Queens. They then returned to their department to teach their fellow officers, reviewing videos of other officers' interactions, discussing listening strategies and reviewing their use-of-force policies.

t.hartz@theday.com