Olivia Gross Photo
Officer Salvati leads the ICAT training on Wednesday.
Two police officers entered a school where a principal warned them of a distressed teacher wielding a knife.
The first step, per class instructions: Stay calm.
City police officers role-played that scenario Wednesday as part of a newly instituted de-escalation training taking place at the New Haven Police Academy at 200 Wintergreen Ave.
Officers-turned-students walked through that hypothetical scenario as Police Chief Karl Jacobson and Mayor Justin Elicker looked on.
The hypothetical school-danger scenario was a part of a new required eight-hour training course in Integrating Communications, Assessment, and Tactics (ICAT) that all New Haven police officers must take.
ICAT is a training guide meant to fill in a gap in training police officers on how to appropriately respond to volatile situations, specifically when subjects are engaged in erratic or dangerous behavior but do not have a firearm on them.
The scenario part of Wednesday’s course ended with officers successfully convincing the “distressed teacher” to drop the knife she was holding and sit down with them to talk.
They did this by staying calm, using her and their own first names, and accurately assessing the severity of the situation.
The classroom portion of the session was led by Officer Mark Salvati. He instructed the officers in the class to consider what they can walk away from in their position of power as officers. He also discussed the importance of gathering information about situations before entering them.
Chief Jacobson.
Two hundred city police officers have already completed this training course, according to Jacobson. One such recent ICAT grad is Officer Chad Curry, who recently put his de-escalation training to use in a real situation involving an apparently suicidal man with a knife at Bella Vista. That situation ended with Curry and his fellow officers successfully preventing that man from harming himself or others, and then getting that man medical treatment.
Jacobson said that this training serves to make the public and officers feel safer.
This training comes as the chief has promised to build back community trust in the police department by practicing the tenets of “procedural justice.” It also comes as five city police officers remain on paid administrative leave for their roles in the mishandling of a man who was hospitalized and paralyzed after suffering a severe injury to his spine while in police custody.
Police academy training lasts 26 weeks, and more de-escalation training will soon be added to the roster, Jacobson said. After ICAT, Active Bystander for Law Enforcement (ABLE) training is next, and it will give officers the tools to intervene with other officers in certain situations, even those in superior ranks.
The scenario would have been more realistic if the knife-wielder was a student or an outside intruder. How insulting this portrayal of teachers is , esp in light of the heroic actions of teachers who have risked and given their lives to protect the students in these attacks.
Perhaps if police were not waiting around outside schools and homes as people are murdered, a few could be saved--- EX--- Uvalde, the Petit murders.