A unique collaboration between Eastern Michigan University (EMU) and the Ann Arbor Police Department (AAPD) is using theater to enhance officer training in crisis intervention. The partnership draws on expertise from EMU’s School of Social Work and Applied Drama and Theatre for the Young program to bring realism and empathy into scenario-based instruction. The effort is part of a broader ongoing initiative by the School of Social Work.

"For over 10 years, the School of Social Work has been doing community partnerships across [Washtenaw County], placing social work interns in programs with formerly incarcerated folks all across the spectrum," says EMU social work professor Barbara Walters. "When we reached out to AAPD, we really just hoped that they thought the partnership would be relevant to their needs, and from there we built a new partnership with them."

Walters connected with AAPD Community Engagement Officer Kasey Whitford, who had been wanting to implement new crisis intervention training (CIT) programs at AAPD. While Walters had initially planned to send a social work intern to work with Whitford at AAPD, she also wanted to approach the project in a more unique way to ensure future trainings would be effective and a worthwhile investment on AAPD’s part.
Doug CoombeEMU social work professor Barbara Walters.
"I’d had an idea to start a mental health unit or team to train officers how to properly respond to those in crisis," Whitford says.

When Whitford shared that idea with Walters, she saw an opportunity to partner with Jessica "Decky" Alexander, EMU professor of applied drama and theatre and director of Engage@EMU. Alexander saw an opportunity to involve her applied drama and theater graduate students, whose work aims to "engage the imagination, challenge and inspire ideas, and support learning for youth and communities," according to the program’s website.

"It was really just good timing, a good partnership, and good people," Alexander says.
Doug CoombeAAPD Community Engagement Officer Kasey Whitford.
While developing project ideas with her graduate students for the 2024-2025 academic year, Alexander says she knew almost immediately which students would be perfect to work with Whitford and the AAPD. Recent EMU graduate Dan Johnson and current EMU grad student Adam Weisman not only had experience in theater, but they also work as Standardized Patients – individuals who "have been trained to accurately portray a specific patient role, assess clinical skills, and provide constructive feedback about a student's performance" in medical settings, according to a definition from Michigan Medicine. Both Johnson and Weisman felt that that working with AAPD was perfectly suited to their experience.

"I’m a theater person, and I like figuring out ways I can use what I do to help advance justice and empathy while taking care of others," Johnson says. "A project like this is right up my alley."

"There’s a lot of room for growth in this program, and a lot of room for simulation work in all careers," Weisman says. "When you have trained actors as part of that training, it can reflect real life in ways that people don’t expect."
Doug CoombeEngage @ EMU Director Jessica "Decky" Alexander.
Johnson and Weisman worked alongside Whitford, using previous crisis intervention presentations she had made and studying materials from the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), to edit existing hypothetical crisis scenarios for AAPD officers. Johnson says these scenarios occasionally represented individuals going through crisis "unkindly or stereotypically." He says the best way to teach others is by giving them materials that are "more humanized" to better reflect situations the officers may encounter. 

"When you’re dealing with these kinds of scenarios, the goal is to portray real people. It isn’t helpful from a training standpoint to play a stereotype," Johnson says. "We never want to be dishonest or disrespectful when dealing with people, so we tried to bring in a level of empathy and respect to the performance."

An unexpected outcome of the partnership was a shift in Johnson and Weisman’s opinions on police work and the officers performing it. Weisman says seeing officers adjust and improvise in real time during the training gave him "a new respect" for their work. Johnson left the experience with a reignited passion for trying to bring about change within institutions that have not always approached their work with an empathetic social work lens, and a recognition that doing so takes time and effort.
Doug CoombeEMU graduate Dan Johnson.
"Describing this kind of training on paper sounds simple, but it isn’t. It’s much different than standardized patient training," Johnson says. "To be flexible enough to work in the moment, so ... it feels real [for the learners], is not the easiest thing in the world."

"Doing these scenarios reminded me that we live in a world where we see so many instances of bad deescalation, and there are so many that do go well that we don’t see," Weisman says. "I don’t know if I ever thought of it that way before taking on this project."

Because officers had only ever done similar training with their co-workers performing the scenarios, Whitford feels that officers sometimes had a hard time immersing themselves in the training. She says that leads to training that isn’t as applicable to real-life situations the officers may encounter. She says some of the scenarios are typically based only on definitions of mental illness or neurodivergence, which don’t always reflect the lived experiences of individuals officers may encounter. Weisman and Johnson did their best to avoid that approach while rewriting the scenarios. 
Doug CoombeEMU grad student Adam Weisman.
"I have been through every one of these scenarios in my work," Whitford says. "The way that Adam and Dan went about it, they felt even more real in this training."

As more institutions seek to employ social workers and social work interns, there will be more opportunities for students like Weisman and Johnson to build similar partnerships. While the AAPD-EMU partnership felt unconventional at first, both Alexander and Walters see potential for it to expand.

"We do a lot of cross-disciplinary work in the social work department, but not typically with the theater department here," Walters says. "Now that we’ve discovered this, I feel like I have so many ideas now. If I heard someone wanted to implement training like this, I would point them toward the theater department in a heartbeat."
Doug CoombeBarbara Walters, Adam Weisman, Kasey Whitford, and Dan Johnson at Eastern Michigan University.
Whitford says she could envision using a similar approach in other officer trainings, such as in active shooter or crisis negotiation classes. She hopes that by approaching these mandatory trainings in more unique ways, officers will be better equipped to de-escalate situations, and potentially lessen instances where de-escalation fails. 

"I never would have done scenario training with people I didn’t know before this, but I knew that I wanted to try something new with it," Whitford says. "There are still a lot of things for the department to do as a whole, but this really made an impact and is a great start."