MIAMI – After a man was killed in Homestead on Sunday, his mother tells CBS News Miami he struggled with mental health issues. Daniel Allen Kempf had battled depression and even attempted suicide in the past, according to his mother, Yaneitsy Rosete.
Homestead police say the person involved in Sunday’s shooting was armed and the officer was forced to fire. They have not confirmed that the victim was Kempf.
This incident led us to investigate what is being done in Miami-Dade County to help officers deal with incidents like this. We learned that a programme called ‘The Criminal Mental Health Project’ was created in 2000 to help people with serious mental illness get treatment.
Judge Steve Leifman, Associate Administrative Judge, Criminal Division for Miami Dade County, helped create the programme. He said he got the idea after a case he presided over in which a defendant was arrested for a minor offence.
“He turned out to be a Harvard-trained psychiatrist who worked at Jackson Memorial Hospital. He had late-onset schizophrenia,” Leifman recalls.
Judge Leifman says the case highlighted the failings of the community mental health and criminal justice systems.
“What we found was that we were embarrassingly dysfunctional. We were spending millions of dollars on assessments for all these very minor cases, only to put the person back on the street without any treatment services, and they kept cycling in and out,” he said.
So they developed a pre- and post-arrest diversion system. During the pre-diversion programme, law enforcement officers go through 40 hours of training, which teaches them how to identify who is in crisis, how to de-escalate the situation and where to take them instead of just arresting them.
“We now have the largest trained force of CIT (Crisis Intervention Team) officers in the country. We have about 8,500 officers trained in all 36 of our divisions. As a result of these officers and their work, we have gone from 118,000 arrests a year to about 53,000.
Through the post-booking diversion programme, they’ve changed the screening process for people who are booked into prison. If they meet a certain criteria, they meet with a psychiatrist, they’re put in a crisis stabilisation unit, and then they’re given the opportunity to enter a diversion programme.
Judge Leifman says the creation of the Miami Center for Mental Health and Recovery will help address a critical mental health issue in the community. A first-of-its-kind facility that will open in six months. He says it’ll offer treatment and rehabilitation for those with serious mental health problems. In cases like Kempf’s, the outcome could be different.
