Objective
It is generally assumed that police officers’ self-selection into the specialized, week-long Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) training is a critical feature of the overarching CIT program. However, issues pertaining to self-selection have not been empirically examined. In this study, it was hypothesized that officers entering CIT training, especially those self-selecting into it, would have: (1) a higher likelihood of exposure to/experience with mental health issues and mental health professionals, and (2) greater empathy and psychological mindedness.
Methods
177 officers—including 109 non-CIT officers, 24 pre-CIT officers assigned to training, and 44 pre-CIT officers who voluntarily self-selected into training—were assessed before and after their week-long classes (non-CIT officers were enrolled in other courses). Basic sociodemographic characteristics were assessed, and four psychometrically sound measures of empathy and psychological mindedness were administered. Associations between officer status and sociodemographic variables, past exposure/experience, and empathy and psychological mindedness were examined.
Results
The three groups did not differ on three of four exposure/experience variables; however, self-selected pre-CIT officers were more likely to have prior exposure to mental health professionals. No differences were found between the three groups on measures of empathy or psychological mindedness. One measure of empathy increased significantly after the week-long CIT training.
Conclusions
Findings did not support the hypothesis that officers self-selecting into CIT training would have greater baseline empathy and psychological mindedness. While there may be other justifiable reasons to argue for the importance of volunteering, these two traits do not appear to be greater among officers self-selecting into CIT.
In implicit model following one attempts to back so as to equal the output dynamics of a desirchange the output dynamics of the plant using feedable model. This paper presents a solution to implicit model following using the theory of feedforward matrices. The solution is reformulated and shown to be equivalent to eigenvalue eigenvector placement.
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