Team Research

Fatal encounters between police and the public too often involve behavioral-health crises. Police are often the first to encounter community members experiencing acute mental-health crises (e.g., psychosis, severe anxiety) and/or substance-related crises (e.g., intoxication, stimulant-induced psychosis). In these high-stress encounters, miscommunication can escalate to use of force and civilian fatalities; national estimates indicate that roughly one in four deaths during law-enforcement contact involves a person with serious mental illness, and about one in five decedents show mental-illness symptoms or drug-induced disruptive behavior. The gap we target is communication and de-escalation in moments complicated by psychosis, intoxication, or both. We propose an interdisciplinary, VR-integrated De-Escalation Training Collaborative to design a scalable training-and-assessment blueprint that strengthens officers’ crisis recognition, trauma-informed communication, and step-wise de-escalation to reduce harm to civilians. 

Using immersive, co-created scenarios—developed with law-enforcement trainers, behavioral-health clinicians, and community advisors—we will prototype a four-module curriculum covering (1) mental and behavioral health symptoms, (2) substance misuse and co-occurring conditions, (3) crisis-communication skills, and (4) stepwise de-escalation tactics, all practiced and assessed in an immersive VR environment. Pre-seed support will help toward convening the team, run scenario/design charrettes, align platform/analytics/privacy requirements, build an evaluation framework (behavioral competencies and rubrics), launch a project website, and cultivate agency/funder partners. The outcome would be a fundable package positioning our UGA team for competitive seed and external opportunities (e.g., NIJ, DoD, DOJ-COPS, SAMHSA, NSF, Foundations) and a subsequent multi-site pilot with rigorous mixed-methods evaluation—a path to scalable national dissemination of VR de-escalation training that reduces preventable deaths and harm across communities. 

Team Lead

Lee, Hee
hyl82711@uga.edu
College: School of Social Work

Team Members

Ahn, Sun Joo (Grace)
sjahn@uga.edu
College: Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication
Department: Advertising & Public Relations

Silk, P. Daniel
dsilk@uga.edu
Department: UGA Public Safety and University of Georgia Police Department

Clark, Jeffrey
jclark@police.uga.edu
Department: University of Georgia Police Department

Shannon, Sarah
sshannon@uga.edu
College: Franklin College of Arts and Sciences
Department: Criminal Justice Studies Program

Doshi, Prashant
pdoshi@uga.edu
College: College of Engineering
Department: Department of Computer Science

Soobin, Kim
Soobin.Kim@uga.edu
College: School of Social Work