By NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — Hutchinson Police Chief Jeff Hooper wants to use grant funds available to deploy a new technology for a less lethal means of restraint for people in crisis.
"You approved in the budget to add those two new officers to create that crisis response team, that will be responding to those individuals in our community that are truly in crisis, whether that's mental health crisis or substance abuse crisis," Hooper said. "While those individuals on that team will be specially trained to defuse the situation and we're working on some additional advance training for that, that's always the hope, frankly, these individuals can become extremely violent and there are times when they're kind of out of touch with what's really going on. They don't even recognize law enforcement officers. We're always looking for ways to be able to restrain them to prevent them from causing harm to themselves or others."
This is considered less lethal than using a Taser.
"It's a cable that would either wrap around their legs or around their upper torso and their arms so that they can't walk, they can't run away, they can't move or harm anybody," Hooper said. "There's several occasions where, even this year, where we have somebody in that state and officers are standing there and this person, you know that once we move in to try to restrain them, they're going to fight. They're going to become violent. This allows us to secure them without ever having to lay hands on them."
Given that this would be limited to the crisis response team, it will obviously be used very rarely at this point.
"This would be an absolute last resort," Hooper said. "When we're working with those situations and we're working with people that are in crisis, as long as they're not a danger to themself or a danger to some other member of the community, like let's say, they're holding a child or something, or they're a danger to somebody else, time is on our side. In those cases, we're going to continue to talk to them, we're going to continue to try to work with them, to talk them down, to defuse that situation. We wouldn't use this tool as long as they were not a threat. We would just let time play its part."
The tool is estimated to cost around $4400 and would be paid for with a portion of the federal Edward Byrne Justice Assistance Program grant funds approved by the City Council on Tuesday.