A city has a way of moving past its fractures. On most weekday afternoons, the South Academy Street Bridge in Greenville, South Carolina, is just a concrete conduit for late-day commuters leaving the downtown office towers—just a mundane hum of tires rolling over asphalt.
But on Sept. 16 at around 4 p.m., that orderly scene evaporated when a bystander witnessed a break in the routine. She flagged down a patrol officer, Caitlyn Holder, who happened to be nearby on McBee Avenue.
Someone had climbed over the railing of the bridge.
As Holder climbed the concrete span and dispatch arranged officers to divert traffic, she seamlessly stepped into an auxiliary role that has become the new baseline of American policing. Holder, who received crisis intervention training from the Greenville Police Department, followed the procedures she learned. She slowed down and listened.
The man told her he was tired and wanted to die.
“Officers are trained at high levels to handle situations such as these,” Holder later told The Epoch Times.
Holder and officers like her have stepped into the breach to meet a staggering nationwide infrastructure gap left by a fractured public mental health system. Across the United States, roughly 2 million people suffering mental health issues are booked into jails annually, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. This street-level crisis led police officers to adopt new strategies—ones counter-intuitive to traditional law enforcement, winning not with handcuffs but with “active and reflective listening.”
“You never know what someone is going through,” Holder says. “Just because you may never have been in someone’s shoes does not mean you cannot take a minute to hear their story.”
She notes the words of her mentor, “You’ll never meet a stranger,” spoken by the late Sgt. Ashley Munoz, a beloved 11-year veteran of the department who tragically passed away earlier this year.
The playbook of crisis intervention training subverts the standard “command presence” of police officers. Instead, it aims for deliberate verbal deescalation. Officers are taught to dramatically lower their vocal pitch and adopt non-threatening body language that lower adrenaline levels. They learn to buy time with tactical silence rather than resolve the situation rapidly. Officers can win the troubled individual back by offering small choices that give a feeling of agency, a chance to choose life.
Standing on the open bridge, Holder waited with the man. She lent him a shoulder to lean on and mirrored his emotion to let him know he was being listened to. She gave him time to change his mind.
He asked for help.
Soon he climbed back onto the safe side of the railing and was taken to a hospital.
“He was strong enough to ask for help when a lot of people aren’t strong enough to do so,” Holder later told reporters. “That really stood out to me because, earlier in my life I was afraid to ask for help too when I was having a bad day.”
The officer said her parents raised her to put others before herself, and that became her calling.
Officer Caitlyn Holder of the Greenville Police Department. Greenville Police Department
Holder had to stand on South Academy Street Bridge that day because of a simple fact: the system is reeling from shock. The surge in crisis intervention training since 2020 came after a spark had ignited a larger issue. The COVID-19 pandemic brought isolation and economic stress, and then adult anxiety and depression rates spiked to nearly 40 percent in early 2021, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
This may have been a massive powder keg.
But there were already pre-existing conditions for an emergency. Between the 1960s and the early 2000s, the deinstitutionalization of the nation’s psychiatric hospitals eliminated hundreds of thousands of mental health beds. Meanwhile, the promise of community clinics to absorb those patients never fully materialized.
If this is a systemic fracture, then local law enforcement agencies have been openly mending the aftermath.
“Situations like this remind us that being a police officer is about more than responding to calls,” the Greenville Police Department wrote in a statement online. “Sometimes, it means being there for someone during the darkest moment of their life and helping them find a reason to take that next step toward safety.”
They commended Holder’s “compassion, patience, and professionalism.”
Holder didn’t hesitate to hand the credit to her teammates.
“We all played our roles perfectly,” she said.
Holder also credits another mentor, Sgt. Rachel Hall, who taught to measure professionalism not in tactical speed, but in a willingness to let the clock run out.
“We work 8 to 12-hour shifts, so there is no need to rush any incident,” she says. “If someone wants to tell me their story for eight hours, I will give them the time of day.”
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