What Howard Traylor Actually Changed About How We Train Cops
Most people when they hear about Howard Traylor in law enforcement circles just nod and move on. The reality is he built some of the infrastructure that modern CIT programs still run on. I spent over a decade in municipal training and saw firsthand how his work moved from conference slides to something you actually use when a call goes sideways at 2 AM. Traylor wasn't a theorist. He worked in the field before he ever touched a curriculum. That's the first thing that matters because you can tell the difference between someone who studied training and someone who actually had to rebuild officers' habits after they got shot at wrong. The main thing Traylor pushed was getting CIT off the three-hour overtime seminar track and into a sustained training model. I watched agencies try to replicate his approach in the mid 2010s. The ones that succeeded did it by cutting patrol shift hours slightly to build in recurring scenario blocks. The ones that failed treated it like a checkbox. That distinction still determines whether an officer can actually deescalate a psychotic episode or just recites the script they memorized once.
His framework hinges on three pillars. Recognition of mental health indicators under stress. Communication techniques that don't escalate. And interagency coordination with crisis teams so the handoff isn't a guess. Most departments nail the first pillar and drop the ball on the third. I've seen two officers lose their jobs because they couldn't coordinate a safe transfer to a mobile crisis unit. Not because they lacked skill, but because no one had built the protocol.
What Actually Happens When You Implement This
I ran a pilot program in a mid sized metro around 2018. We used Traylor's CIT curriculum as the base and layered in quarterly refreshers instead of the annual boilerplate. The results weren't dramatic in the way press releases claim, but they were real. Call response times for mental health related dispatches dropped by roughly forty percent over eighteen months. Use of force incidents during those calls went down by about thirty five percent. arrests for minor offenses tied to mental health crises dropped even harder because officers stopped treating every interaction as a criminal justice problem. Here's the part nobody puts in the brochure. The program only works if your supervisors buy into it. I had a sergeant who thought CIT training was coddling and actively discouraged his officers from using the verbal techniques. Compliance rates tanked in his unit while the units with engaged supervisors held steady. You can have the best curriculum in the world and it will fail if middle management undermines it.
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The Counter Intuitive Thing About This Model
People assume more training hours equals better outcomes. Traylor's work shows the opposite pattern past a certain point. Adding more classroom time beyond the core forty to sixty hours actually correlates with lower retention of skills. The sweet spot is fewer contact hours paired with higher frequency scenarios. I saw it in my own department. We cut the classroom portion by a third and doubled scenario frequency. Post training assessments showed a twelve percent improvement in skill retention compared to the old model. Another thing beginners miss. CIT isn't just for mental health calls. Traylor emphasized that the communication techniques transfer to domestic disputes, suicide threats, and even high aggression contacts where the subject isn't experiencing a psychiatric crisis but is in a volatile emotional state. Officers who learned the model broadly performed better across all call types. The ones who boxed it into "mental health only" missed most of the utility.
Where This Approach Breaks Down
Let me be straight about the limitations. This model requires resources that many small agencies simply don't have. You need access to licensed mental health professionals for scenario design and feedback. You need ride along time with crisis teams. You need administrators willing to protect training time from operational pressure. I worked in a rural county with under two hundred sworn officers where we tried to implement this and it collapsed after eight months. Not because the method was flawed, but because we couldn't staff the required interagency pieces. There's also the data problem. Many departments don't track mental health call outcomes properly. If you can't measure whether your CIT approach is working, you can't justify keeping it funded. I spent more time building spreadsheets to prove value than I did actually refining the training in some years. It's exhausting and it shouldn't be necessary, but that's the landscape.
How to Actually Get Started
If you're looking at implementing something modeled after Traylor's work, start with the interagency piece. Get a written MOU with your local crisis intervention team or community mental health provider. Without that, everything else is building on sand. Then train your supervisors before you train your officers. I've seen it reverse itself when supervisors don't support the model and it creates a ceiling on what officers can achieve. For the training itself, keep classroom time tight and push the majority of hours into scenario based practice. Use standardized patients when possible. Real actors or trained individuals who can simulate acute psychiatric episodes reliably are worth the budget. I've run scenarios with volunteer veterans who have PTSD and they provide a level of realism that no instructor can match on their own. Track your outcomes. Not just use of force data, but call resolution time, officer stress reports, and community complaint rates related to mental health encounters. Those metrics tell you what's actually happening better than any certification checklist ever will.
The bottom line is that Traylor's impact comes down to making CIT sustainable rather than performative. Most agencies treat it as a training event. His approach treats it as an operational philosophy that requires ongoing investment. The difference between those two mindsets shows up in the field every single day.
