Sandpoint officer earns CIT honors

SANDPOINT — It was first thing in the morning, the beginning of his shift, when most calls are traffic related. Not so one morning last April when Sandpoint Police officer Michael Aerni responded to a call of a woman threatening to jump from a local bridge.

When Aerni arrived on the U.S. Highway 95 overpass at its crossing over High-way 200, he found a woman standing outside the bridge guardrail, leaning over, and threatening to jump into traffic zipping obliviously past beneath her. Nearby, a good distance away, a civilian was imploring the woman not to make the approximately 20-foot-drop to the highway below.

“There was a lot of traffic going by,” Aerni recalled earlier this week. “Obviously it could have been a fatal situation.”

He got out of his patrol car and slowly approached the woman, talking to her calmly, while fighting his own internal adrenaline rush.

“I was just trying to remain calm,” he said.

Aerni assured the woman things would be fine, and asked if he could come closer.

“How about putting one leg over the rail?” he asked, which she eventually did.

He finally talked her away from the edge.

“She eventually came back over the rail,” Aerni said, and he offered her his arm. “I kind of put my arm around her and walked her back to my car.”

Since the situation happened in the city of Ponderay, Aerni eventually passed responsibility for the woman to Ponderay Police officers, who placed her into protective custody after she continued to express a desire to harm herself.

“And that’s the last I heard of her,” Aerni said.

For his actions that day, Aerni was recently awarded the Crisis Intervention Training Officer of the Year for 2014.

The methods Aerni deployed to talk the woman away from the guardrail were learned via a Crisis Intervention Training course conducted annually by the Bonner County Sheriff’s Office.

Ironically, Aerni had been involved in critiquing scenarios for the training of other officers the year before his encounter on the bridge. His critique scenario? A woman threatening to jump from a building.

“Here I am, critiquing other officers in a similar scenario,” he said of the training, then the real situation.

“It’s invaluable in terms of communicating with other people. It really crosses over into everyday communication with everyday people.”

The techniques officers are taught aren’t “verbal judo,” Aerni said, but figuring out what it is a person may be suffering from, whether it’s a mental health or substance abuse issue. It’s about gaining an understanding of, and communicating with the person, and de-escalating a situation without sacrificing an officer’s, or the public’s safety.

“It definitely opens the door to better communication,” Aerni said.

“It was quite a day,” Aerni said in retrospect. “It was one of those moments in life that could have gone either way. I’m just happy it went the way it did.”

The goal is to help people and find them help, he said.

“I’m just glad it didn’t happen,” Aerni said.

“It’s heartbreaking to think that people get to that place where they think there’s no way out.”