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Mayor Adams rolls out plan to take EMTs out of city's mental health response program
By
Caroline Lewis
Published Nov 14, 2025
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By
Caroline Lewis
Published Nov 14, 2025
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Mayor Eric Adams announced plans Friday to reconfigure staffing for B-HEARD, the pilot program launched in 2021 that offers a non-police response to some 911 mental health calls.
The overhaul comes as Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani prepares to take office. During his campaign, he vowed to significantly expand B-HEARD and make his own changes to the program as part of a broader effort to remove police from the city’s mental health response.
Mamdani did not respond to a request for comment on Adams’ plan and whether it aligns with his vision for the program.
B-HEARD launched under former Mayor Bill de Blasio after a string of incidents in which police killed New Yorkers in mental health crises whom they were called to help.
B-HEARD teams currently consist of social workers employed by NYC Health and Hospitals and emergency medical technicians employed by the FDNY. These teams can be deployed to help people in mental health crises as long as the 911 dispatcher determines they’re not in danger of hurting themselves or others.
Adams announced Friday the model will now be run entirely under the purview of NYC Health and Hospitals without the aid of FDNY EMTs, so that the EMTs can focus on other types of calls and help reduce the city’s worsening emergency response times.
Under the new model, which Adams said is set to launch in spring 2026, B-HEARD teams will consist of a nurse, an ambulance driver and a social worker, all employed by NYC Health and Hospitals.
“This new model for B-HEARD will allow our FDNY EMTs the opportunity to focus further on other emergency response units as part of our city’s efforts to improve ambulance response times and use our resources more efficiently, while still addressing mental health emergencies we continue to see playing out in our city,” Adams said in a statement.
Hiring EMTs has become challenging and has limited the city’s ability to expand B-HEARD, Dr. Mitchell Katz, president and CEO of NYC Health and Hospitals, said Friday.
The administration has previously said a shortage of social workers prevented the program from expanding, but city officials said that’s no longer as big of a barrier as it once was.
William Fowler, a spokesperson for City Hall, said the planned changes will help facilitate B-HEARD’s expansion and won’t affect Mamdani’s proposal to place the B-HEARD program under his planned Department of Community Safety.
But the staffing changes Adams announced are different from the ones laid out by Mamdani.
Mamdani said he will staff the teams with trained peers who have their own lived experiences with mental health issues, a move some mental health advocates have been pushing the city to adopt for years.
Katz said he is open to bringing peers onto the teams, and even said they might be able to double as drivers. But he said he has yet to discuss the planned changes with Mamdani’s team.
Mamdani has also said he will expand the program so that there’s at least one B-HEARD team operating in every neighborhood and more teams in areas with higher demand.
Between its launch in 2021 and June of this year, B-HEARD responded to nearly 35,000 mental health calls, according to the city.
However, a May audit by the city comptroller’s office found that B-HEARD still missed a large share of the calls that were eligible to be diverted to the program because of its limited capacity.
B-HEARD currently operates 16 hours a day in 31 of the city’s 78 police precincts, covering the Bronx, Upper Manhattan, Central Brooklyn and Northeast Queens.
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Caroline Lewis
Caroline Lewis is on the health care beat for WNYC and Gothamist. She has covered COVID, a nurses' strike, the overdose crisis and New York’s marijuana legalization effort, and spent a year investigating patients' medical bills. She always wants to hear about how everyday New Yorkers experience the health system. Got a tip? Email [email protected].
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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