Health & Environment Quiet since Jul 7 Updated Jul 7, 2026
The B-HEARD Promise
New York City launched B-HEARD in 2021 as a civilian alternative to police response for mental health emergencies, but five years on the program handles fewer than 7% of the city's 149,000-plus annual mental health 911 calls. Mamdani's first budget added no new funding to the program despite campaign pledges, opening instead a $260 million Office of Community Safety well short of his promised $1.1 billion. The fight is over who responds to New Yorkers in crisis and whether City Hall will fund an alternative at scale.
The story so far
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Jul 7, 2026 Latest
Five years after launching as a three-precinct Harlem pilot, B-HEARD handles fewer than 7% of New York City's 149,000-plus annual mental health 911 calls, with officers responding to the rest. Mamdani's $126 billion budget, adopted June 30, added no new funding to B-HEARD; the administration opened a $260 million Office of Community Safety covering violence prevention and domestic violence alongside mental health response, a fraction of the $1.1 billion pledged in the campaign.
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Mar 19, 2026
Mayor Mamdani signed an executive order creating an Office of Community Safety led by Renita Francois, a scaled-down version of the $1.1 billion department he campaigned on, launching with two staffers and no immediate shift of 911 response away from the NYPD. "Officers have to handle 200,000 mental health calls a year. That is not a system that is working. Today marks the end of it," Mamdani said.
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Jan 1, 2026
The Independent Budget Office reported B-HEARD's average response time more than doubled since 2022, from about 12 minutes to more than 26, and that only a third of eligible calls in the most recent quarter it analyzed actually got a B-HEARD response. The program ran nine teams per shift on a $35 million budget, up from $26 million in 2022.
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Nov 14, 2025
In his final weeks, Mayor Adams announced B-HEARD would be fully run by NYC Health + Hospitals starting in spring 2026, with teams of a nurse, an ambulance driver, and a social worker, returning FDNY EMTs to ambulance duty. The program had answered nearly 35,000 mental health calls since its 2021 launch.
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May 23, 2025
Comptroller Brad Lander's audit found that 35% of eligible mental health calls from fiscal 2022 through 2024, about 13,000, never got a B-HEARD response, for reasons the city did not track. More than 14,200 eligible crises happened between 1 a.m. and 9 a.m., when the teams do not operate at all.
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Oct 1, 2023
In October 2023, B-HEARD expanded to cover the whole Bronx, its last growth to date, reaching 31 of the city's 78 police precincts and roughly 40% of the population, with no coverage in Staten Island.
Mayor's Office of Community Mental Health NYC Independent Budget Office
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Nov 16, 2022
Public Advocate Jumaane Williams reported that B-HEARD handled only 16% of the mental health 911 calls in its own service area in early 2022, with the NYPD still responding to 84% of mental health crises, and pointed to staffing shortages and thin public data.
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Mar 15, 2022
The Adams administration expanded B-HEARD beyond Harlem to Washington Heights, Inwood, and the South Bronx in March 2022, its first growth under the new mayor. By June the pilot covered 11 precincts.
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Jun 6, 2021
B-HEARD launched four months behind schedule in East Harlem and parts of Central and North Harlem, the 911 dispatch zone with the city's most mental health calls, about 8,400 in 2020. In the first month, operators routed a quarter of the area's mental health 911 calls to the new teams; 95% of people accepted help, against 82% for the traditional NYPD and EMS response, and half were taken to a hospital versus 82%.
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Nov 10, 2020
Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that teams pairing FDNY EMS health professionals with mental health crisis workers would become the default 911 response for mental health emergencies in two high-need precincts, with a February 2021 start. At the time the NYPD responded to nearly every one of the city's mental health 911 calls regardless of severity, and mobile crisis teams handled about 21,000 calls a year.
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