Trained in vain: Former program manager says Sacramento officers received shoddy training for dealing with mentally ill

As the Sacramento Police Department completes a new training program intended to help officers deescalate crises, one of the former managers has questioned the program’s effectiveness and her organization’s financial motives for taking it on.

The California Peace Officers Association, or CPOA, was one of two vendors to split a six-figure contract this past January to provide officers with 40 hours of additional training in how to deal with combative or mentally ill subjects without resorting to deadly force. The additional training was a response to public backlash over last year’s shooting deaths of two African-American men experiencing mental health episodes—Joseph Mann and Dazion Flenaugh.

On December 5, police Chief Daniel Hahn told the City Council that 534 officers had received training from two organizations whose programs’ curriculum were certified by the state Commission on Police Officer Standards and Training, known as POST.

But Christine Feenstra, who resigned as CPOA’s training manager in June, says the association didn’t deliver on its POST-approved curriculum—resulting in a waste of time for roughly 100 officers and a lost opportunity to impart life-saving lessons.

“If something else happens in the city and it was an officer that attended a class that I was responsible for facilitating, I would feel horrible,” Feenstra told SN&R. “I wouldn’t be able to live with that.”

In a brief statement, CPOA Deputy Director Shaun Rundle disputed Feenstra’s depiction of the program, but declined to go into detail. “We stand by our product, as developed and instructed by Dr. Carole McKindley-Alvarez, and the extraordinary work of the Sacramento Police Department,” Rundle wrote in an email. “We have no further comment at this time.”

But Feenstra, who says she helped develop the program with McKindley-Alvarez, says it was rushed into production before it was properly beta-tested—and that her organization may have been more interested in making a buck than saving lives.

Feenstra and McKindley-Alvarez, a psychologist at St. Mary’s College, crafted the program that was first pilot-tested with members of the Police Department in February.

“The feedback was horrible,” Feenstra said. “There was a lot of feedback that [outside speakers] didn’t know what they were talking about. That they didn’t know their audience. They didn’t realize these were seasoned cops. The officers were just really unhappy.”

Despite the negative reviews, Feenstra said CPOA scheduled its first class weeks later. With her other responsibilities, she said, she didn’t have time to make the necessary changes to the class. She was supposed to work with retired police Officer Tony Duckworth, who left CPOA’s deputy director post just as the program was being developed. She said his position was vacant for “at least” a month and that she felt pressured by CPOA Executive Director Carol Leveroni to forge ahead so CPOA wouldn’t lose the police contract.

As proof of the latter, Feenstra provided SN&R with a text message exchange between her and Leveroni. When Feenstra informed Leveroni that the City Council had approved the crisis intervention training, Leveroni sent a text that read:

“:) we are getting some of that cheddah! :)”

A December 17 phone call to the number Feenstra provided was answered by Leveroni, who said CPOA planned to respond on Monday.

CPOA spokesman John McGinness stopped just short of acknowledging the text’s authenticity. “Carol doesn’t have a copy of that text, but I think it’s consistent with something she may have said,” he said.

While McGinness said he wished Leveroni chose a different term, he added that he thought it was consistent with CPOA’s overall mission. “It’s what CPOA does: develop and expand training programs,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anything inappropriate about that philosophy or attitude that [message] expresses.”

As an example of how the CPOA’s classes didn’t match the POST-approved description, Feenstra said that each of the three classes she oversaw ended at least an hour before they were supposed to, falling short of the 40-hour training requirement.

Additionally, on April 20 and May 25, Feenstra said, she had to sub in for McKindley-Alvarez despite her lack of experience as an instructor and no POST approval.

Feenstra said she played a series of videos for the officers and brought in guest speakers, including a representative from Heritage Oaks Hospital. Originally, she thought a clinician would come, but instead a communications employee showed up who Feenstra then (somewhat ironically) learned “had never done public speaking before.”

Feenstra added that the CPOA classes didn’t feature physical demonstrations on how to handle people in a mental health crisis, or bring in any speakers with mental illnesses themselves, only their relatives. And no tests were administered to see if officers absorbed the material.

Before she resigned in June, Feenstra said, about a hundred officers went through CPOA’s program. Feenstra said she left due to a combination of finding it difficult to work under Leveroni, being overwhelmed with responsibilities that she felt exceeded her experience, and feeling dejected that her course wasn’t having the impact she wanted. When Feenstra departed, she said, she was replaced by an administrative training coordinator with “zero applicable experience.”

“It really fell short,” Feenstra said of the final product. “[McKindley-Alvarez] does a good job, but she’s just one piece of the puzzle.”

McKindley-Alvarez didn’t respond to SN&R’s requests for comment. CPOA spokesman McGinness, a former Sacramento County sheriff who joined the association after Feenstra left, said the program improved as it went along. But he wasn’t able to answer some questions about the actual nature of those improvements and acknowledged he had no personal interactions with the classes. For instance, he said role-playing was added to the curriculum, but couldn’t describe what kind.

Feenstra originally shared her concerns about the training program with Sacramento’s Black Lives Matter chapter, which raised them during a November 28 City Council meeting. Mayor Darrell Steinberg acknowledged the activists who spoke during public comment and expressed a desire to publicly evaluate the training after it was completed, although nothing has been formally scheduled.

While still skeptical of the training’s effectiveness, BLM Sacramento founder Tanya Faison said something must be done to decrease the likelihood of deadly police encounters.

“This training, I don’t know if it’s going to, for sure, make these officers do the right thing when they’re faced with these types of situations,” Faison told SN&R after the meeting. “But I feel like we need as many efforts as possible and we need our city government to be making those efforts.”

As for the other vendor the Police Department contracted with, the feedback has been more positive. Disability Response was founded eight years ago by retired Sacramento police Officer Michael Summers, who trains numerous sheriffs’ and police departments on responding to those with mental health issues.

Officer Linda Matthew, a department spokeswoman, said she took the course and called it a “great class” that had her attention the entire time.

Summers said he brings in experts with overlapping experiences in health care and law enforcement or military service, which helps them relate to the officers. There’s also a comprehensive overview of mental illness, followed by panels with people afflicted with mental illnesses and their family members, who have had firsthand interactions with law enforcement. Toward the end of the course, officers are put through hours of role-playing to see if they have been listening, Summers said.

Summers said his most recent class was “one of the best” he’d ever taught, although he feels officers have unfairly been relied upon to handle the “social problem” of untreated mental illness. “For the amount of people that are seriously mentally ill, there’s nowhere near the services,” he said.

As of December 4, a Police Department spokesman said, $157,000 of the $650,000 contract has been split between Disability Response and CPOA.

For his part, Summers said that he’s administered seven of the eight classes he was contracted to do by the city. But he cautioned against viewing the course as a panacea. “You have to remember even with all these trainings, occasionally, bad things are going to happen,” Summers said. “There’s absolutely nothing that law enforcement can do to prevent that. But this goes a long way to help.”

On November 24, police officers responded to a yelling man in a field, who held a pair of knives. Over an hourlong negotiation, police calmed the man down enough to detain him safely. Summers said the officers’ conduct was “just perfect.”