Mental health workers will replace police officers in responding to some 911 calls under a pilot program announced Tuesday by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.
The program, to be rolled out next year in two neighborhoods, will give mental health professionals the lead role when someone calls 911 because a family member is in crisis, officials said.
The pilot program is modeled on existing programs in cities including Eugene, Oregon, where teams of paramedics and crisis workers have been responding to mental health 911 calls for more than 30 years. A main goal of such programs is to avoid bad outcomes from interactions between police officers and people suffering from mental illness or addiction such as the March 30 death of Daniel Prude in Rochester, New York.
“This is the first time in our history that health professionals will be the default responders to mental health emergencies,” said New York City first lady Chirlane McCray, who has been in charge of a broader mental health initiative called ThriveNYC that critics say has shown few results.
Police officers together with emergency medical technicians employed by the Fire Department now respond to nearly all mental health 911 calls regardless of whether there is a risk of violence, city officials said. Under the pilot program, unarmed mental health teams composed of health professionals and crisis workers from the Fire Department’s Emergency Medical Services will instead respond to mental health emergencies, they said.
A police officer will join the mental health team when there is a possibility that the person in crisis is armed or presents a danger, said McCray, who joined de Blasio and other city officials at a news briefing.
Details including which two neighborhoods the pilot program will be launched in have not been determined, the officials said.
(AP)
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4 Responses
Finally! This is a very good idea. If we had had this years ago Gideon Bush and many others would still be alive.
“Details including which two neighborhoods the pilot program will be launched in have not been determined”/ Probably will be Boro Park and Williamsburg where D’Blast thinks there are so many mentally challenged people.
Back to the good old days. While police armed for fighting terrorists and professional gangsters are inappropriate for dealing with people acting meshuganah, the former systems of hauling them away to a mental health facility in a straightjacket raises its own set of civil rights issues. (locking people up without due process of law is inherently problematic, even if they are being locked up “for their own good”).
For example if someone is standing on a street corner proclaiming that Biden stole the election, the police know enough law not to arrest someone for spouting unpopular and wrong ideas, but the mental health police will see the person as delusional and haul them off. That’s one reason we changed (note some countries, Soviet Union in particular, stuck with having mental health police to round up delusional people).
I think a better idea is to send DeBlasio on some of these urgent calls. There are troubled citizens with the sincere desire of communicating with the mayor; he should afford these individuals in troubled neighborhoods the allowance to speak 1-1 with him.