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B-HEARD responses have fallen, but city agencies disagree on the extent
By
Charles Lane
Published Jun 5, 2026
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Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office
By
Charles Lane
Published Jun 5, 2026
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City lawmakers scrutinizing New York City’s B-HEARD mental health response program this week encountered a problem: City agencies offered different accounts of how often it responds to mental health crisis calls.
Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch testified at a City Council budget hearing on Monday that B-HEARD responded to 1,411 of nearly 18,000 calls that dispatchers flagged as potentially eligible during the first four months of the year. But FDNY figures reviewed by Gothamist show the program responded to 2,020 of the 2,058 calls the department deemed eligible over the same period, the department said.
B-HEARD, which was launched in 2021, is still considered a pilot program that pairs EMS workers with social workers and sends them, instead of police, to 911 calls involving a person in a mental health crisis, provided they are nonviolent and unarmed. The teams operate from 9 a.m. to 1 a.m. in 31 of the city's 78 police precincts.
The NYPD’s figure alarmed some city councilmembers at Monday's hearing, but it was not aligned with statistics from the FDNY, which is in charge of EMS and runs B-HEARD.
The Independent Budget Office found B-HEARD responded to a peak of about 870 calls a month in late 2023. In the latest figures available to the office, responses had fallen to roughly 350 calls a month in early 2025 under then-Mayor Eric Adams.
The figures Tisch cited on Monday suggested that the decline has continued. The FDNY’s figures, however, showed the program responding to nearly 500 calls a month.
Meanwhile, the program’s budget increased from about $33 million in 2024 to roughly $35 million in 2026.
A police official explained the difference in numbers as a difference between what the FDNY reports back to the NYPD and what each considers the universe of eligible 911 calls.
When a New Yorker calls 911 the NYPD determines how the call is routed. Police officers flag calls that may be eligible for B-HEARD, which explains the 18,000 calls Tisch described on Monday. But the department's numbers include calls outside the precincts B-HEARD operates in and outside the hours the program is in effect. The NYPD logs a response only when EMS confirms a B-HEARD team can respond.
But the FDNY winnows that number down, officials said, setting aside calls that come in outside the program's hours, outside the limited number of precincts it covers or turn out to involve a weapon or violence.
Alex Vitale, who advised the Mamdani administration on its community safety plans, said he was troubled by the way Tisch characterized response figures at the hearing and said the gap likely reflects a mismatch between the two agencies' systems.
Still, he said the fight over response counts misses the point. The measure of success, he said, is not how many calls B-HEARD answers but how many people in mental distress are diverted from hospitals and jails.
By that standard, he said, the program is failing: Police still show up on most runs and patients are routinely taken to the emergency room.
"There's a whole series of failures at work here," Vitale said. "There's no one agency that is the problem."
The discrepancy points to a gap in data and communication that has frustrated lawmakers, policy experts and city officials alike over a program all of them have said they want to see work.
After hearing Tisch’s accounting of the program, Councilmember Lincoln Restler of Brooklyn called B-HEARD "essentially irrelevant.”
"The police department is not involved or engaged in this initiative in any meaningful way," he said.
Police officials said dispatchers routed all 18,000 potentially eligible calls to a screening process for a program with limited capacity. Officials added that Tisch met this week with the deputy mayor of the new Office of Community Safety, Renita Francois, to start the conversation on how to work together.
After learning of the FDNY’s higher response rate on Wednesday, he said the critique still stood because so few mental health calls are ultimately diverted from police to clinicians.
Fire officials told lawmakers on Monday that they are rebuilding B-HEARD after the Adams administration shifted the program away from its FDNY-based staffing model and into NYC Health and Hospitals.
A spokesperson for the hospital system did not respond to a request for comment.
"B-HEARD is a very important program," Fire Commissioner Lillian Bonsignore testified on Monday, saying its teams "do a very difficult job for a community that needs specific help and we were happy to get it back."
City Hall said it also remains committed to the program.
"The Mamdani administration is fully committed to strengthening B-HEARD," said spokesperson Sam Raskin, who added that the mayor's budget "makes critical investments to strengthen and expand that work."
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new york city
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Charles Lane
Charles is a Day-of reporter focused on breaking news and enterprise. He’s very friendly and can be reached at [email protected], or more securely on whatsapp/signal 631-295-6715
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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