A growing number of 911 calls involving people in the midst of a mental health crisis is being routed to B-HEARD, a program that sends out teams of social workers and emergency medical technicians rather than police.
The program responded to nearly 15,000 calls last fiscal year, up from about 7,000 the previous year, even as its planned geographic expansion stalled, according to the latest city data.
While Mayor Eric Adams celebrated the pilot program’s progress last week, mental health advocates and some City Council members raised concerns at a hearing on Monday, saying the program is still being sidelined by the city and too many New Yorkers with mental health issues are being exposed to potentially dangerous encounters with the police.
A key issue is the criteria for routing calls to B-HEARD instead of the NYPD. City officials said anytime a 911 caller indicates the person they’re calling about is at risk of self-harm or harming others, the case cannot be routed to B-HEARD. Emergency medical service operators who triage the calls use computer prompts to tell them which questions to ask to determine who should respond, city officials said. The process disqualified the majority of the 911 mental health calls in the B-HEARD pilot area last fiscal year.
While B-HEARD responded to nearly 75% of the calls it was eligible to take in the pilot area, that amounted to just 30% of mental health calls overall, according to city data.
A coalition called Correct Crisis Intervention Today-NYC has been pushing the city for years to reform B-HEARD to expand its reach and reduce the likelihood that police will show up to a call. Jordyn Rosenthal, the coalition’s lead organizer, said at the hearing that the group wants the city to link B-HEARD to 988, a suicide and crisis hotline, rather than requiring callers to go through 911. The group also wants the city to employ peers who have personal experiences with mental health issues to go out on the calls, he said.
“Guns do not help the situation. Uniforms do not help the situation,” said Peggy Herrera, a Queens woman who testified at the hearing.
Herrera called 911 in 2019 when her son was experiencing a mental health episode, but by the time police arrived she said he had calmed down and they were no longer needed. She was arrested trying to keep police from entering her apartment.
Both advocates and City Council members at the hearing invoked the names of New Yorkers who have been killed by police responding to mental health calls in recent years, including Deborah Danner and Kawsaki Trawick.
Jamie Neckles, assistant commissioner of mental health at the city health department, said 988 already has many tools to help people who are uncertain if they need a police response. She noted that in addition to counseling people over phone or text, 988 operators can send out mobile crisis teams staffed with social workers to assist people experiencing mental health issues and connect them to follow-up care. Still, those teams can take several hours to arrive in some cases, precluding them from serving as an emergency response.
Beyond the criteria for taking calls, B-HEARD is also limited by its staffing. The program currently covers 31 of the city’s 77 precincts across every borough except Staten Island and has nine teams of emergency medical technicians and social workers operating at a time — including one cohort for a daytime shift and another for the evening. The program operates 16 hours a day.
City officials have previously said that finding social workers to staff the program has been a challenge. But on Monday, officials said they have no current plans to expand the program’s staffing or reach, adding that they are working to refine it so B-HEARD teams can take more calls.