Other cities show that alternative response is a promising way to handle many quality-of-life complaints.
Polling shows that public safety is among New York City voters’ top concerns. But it’s important to be specific when talking about the issue. Candidates in the recent Democratic mayoral primary focused mainly on quality-of-life issues — homelessness, mental illness, public drug use — and not on violent crime. There’s good reason for that: New York has seen a remarkable drop in murders, with the NYPD reporting shootings at an all-time low through the first half of the year. Of course, there is work left to do, including stemming a years-long rise in felony assaults — but it seems as though lower-level crimes are top-of-mind for many New Yorkers.
This raises a serious question: What is the best way for the city to address these quality-of-life issues that are preoccupying people?
One candidate running for mayor, Zohran Mamdani, wants to lean most heavily into non-police responders by creating a Department of Community Safety. Though there are many details left to fill in, the broad idea is that non-police responders in this new agency would handle many calls where there is no clear threat of violence — freeing up the police to focus on major crimes.
Many are skeptical of this approach, known in the field as “alternative response,” but both experience and research suggest it holds significant promise. That’s why it is quietly proliferating across the country as a new way of addressing mental health and a host of other reasons people call 911.
Quality of life matters
Public attention to quality-of-life concerns is understandable. The presence of people living with serious mental illness and other health concerns is highly visible. Public drug use can lead the people witnessing it and its externalities to feel uneasy. Homelessness continues to spike, due to the ongoing housing affordability crisis and a more recent influx of asylum seekers.
But addressing these issues, particularly those that involve mental illness, requires a more nuanced approach than simply deploying the police — who are oriented to patrol and gain compliance. Not only do police lack the training to deal with some of these issues, but research shows that police also are 11.6 times more likely to use force when dealing with individuals with serious mental illness. Police themselves do not want to be the primary or default responders to these situations, which can be more effectively resolved by others trained in the specific skills needed to not only deescalate crises, but also connect people to a range of supportive services.
Alternative response can take different forms, but here’s what almost all its applications have in common. In response to 911 calls, many cities now send specialized, unarmed professionals trained specifically to resolve many kinds of calls traditionally handled by police — mental and behavioral health crises, certainly, but also traffic violations and other issues that call takers determine not to carry a specific risk of violence. By matching responders’ expertise to the scenarios at hand, alternative response enables safer, more effective problem resolution, and allows police to focus instead on higher-priority issues like violent crime.
The STAR program in Denver, Colorado, for example, was associated with fewer mental health and substance use crises being recorded as low-level criminal offenses, as well as reductions in more serious incidents which would always be classified as crimes. The Policing Project has worked to study and expand the use of alternative response programs in cities nationwide.
A recent Vital City article was somewhat dismissive of alternative response approaches for New York, citing issues here like lagging 911 response times, the risk of escalation during street encounters, and, simply, that “[c]ops remain best equipped to handle” certain issues.
But the evidence in many cities across the country shows that these kinds of concerns are unfounded.
How alternative response works
Calls regarding people who are unhoused, experiencing mental health crises or engaged in substance use don’t escalate to arrest or uses of force as frequently when a city sends only unarmed, trained practitioners in response. The option to send these kinds of service providers does not mean that dangerous situations are effectively ignored, as defenders of the status quo suggest. Rather, with the right dispatch protocols in place, the approach calibrates the response to the situation, ensuring that the “right” people — those trained to address the situation at hand — arrive on the scene. This means cops are freed up to focus on the concerns in the community that they are, in fact, best equipped to handle. As a result, in our work across the country, we’ve seen that 911 response times can drop sharply when police no longer have to respond to certain call types, like traffic crashes in which there is no injury.
Yet today, the simple and sad fact is that New York City lags far behind other cities in alternative response adoption, with the City’s primary alternative response program — B-HEARD — barely scratching the surface of even the mental health-related calls it could take off the hands of police, with more than one in three eligible calls not receiving a response. Given the successful experiences seen elsewhere, the question for our next mayor shouldn’t be whether to consider alternative approaches — but how widespread their use should be, and how to lead city agencies to do the work of actually embracing this approach.
Consider the example of Minneapolis, a leader in alternative police response. There, the city has diverted nearly 9% of 911 calls to alternative programs through a mix of behavioral crisis response, traffic control, animal control, 311 and online responses. After our report showed that the city could safely divert nearly half of its calls through expanded programming addressing these and other call types (such as neighbor disputes, which are diverted from police to trained mediators in other cities), the city set a goal of sending 20% of its 911 calls to alternative programs, becoming the first jurisdiction in the nation to name such a goal.
In Denver, a rigorous evaluation showed that a pilot alternative response program has helped drive a 34% reduction in the kinds of quality-of-life incidents it was designed to address (such as intoxication, indecent exposure and trespassing) at a quarter the cost of traditional policing. After one year, not one of the 1,400 emergency calls handled by STAR led to an arrest, injury or call for police backup. Similarly, the nation’s longest-running alternative response program, in Eugene, Oregon, handled 10% of calls that otherwise would have been directed to police — mostly involving people experiencing homelessness or serious mental illness — at 2% of the police department’s budget. In 2019, they called for police backup 1.6% of the time.
When New Orleans turned to alternative response, the city’s emergency call response time fell from 180 minutes in April 2023 to 53 minutes in September 2024, even though the number of police officers dropped in the same time period. New Orleans now relies on non-police responders for a range of issues, from traffic crashes to behavioral health. By mid-2024, these responders were even resolving nearly 8% of calls focused on non-violent property crimes, over the phone.
Albuquerque, New Mexico, created a Community Safety Department in 2021, which responds to crisis calls and routine matters like welfare checks, as well as overseeing the city’s violence intervention programming. Earlier this year, the department’s alternative responders served their 100,000th call for service. Fewer than 1% of the department’s responses have resulted in the police being brought in.
Applying the model to New York City
New York, of course, faces a higher volume of calls than other U.S. cities — some 9 million calls to the NYPD each year. But that only makes its failure to turn more decisively to alternative response all the more remarkable. If a significant proportion of those calls were diverted to alternative response, the City would not only produce better outcomes for people facing non-criminal crises, but it would free up NYPD resources to focus on what they’re trained to do.
NYPD response times — which have been rising in recent years — cannot be solved by increasing the number of officers alone when post-pandemic recruitment challenges have made staffing relief a near impossibility.
New York has already taken some steps to roll out an alternative response approach. In 2021, the City launched B-HEARD, a pilot program to deploy EMS and mental health services, rather than police, to calls about mental health crises — the vast majority of which do not require police presence. Where the B-HEARD program has been deployed, it has been successful: After its first six months, it resulted in 43% of those who received a mental health assessment accepting help and being connected with care in their community, rather than being cycled through hospital emergency rooms.
But despite a clear track record of success, a recent audit by the Comptroller’s Office found that B-HEARD is falling far short of its potential — because it’s been underfunded. Between 2022 and 2024, B-HEARD responded to 24,071 calls, and 99% percent of surveyed recipients of the program felt B-HEARD treated them with courtesy and respect. But the teams were unable to respond to more than 35% of eligible calls due to issues like limited program hours.
New York City urgently needs to scale B-HEARD to address more mental health calls and reach more parts of the city at more times of day. And more resources are needed to assess and improve its performance — including a formal evaluation.
Mental health crises are far from the only 911 call types that can and should be diverted to other responders. A 2022 analysis by the Vera Institute of Justice found that more than 60% of New York’s 9 million 911 calls were for non-criminal matters such as reporting a suspicious person or requesting a vehicle be towed. Many of these are perfect candidates for alternative response teams.
In order to get there, the City must leverage data to better direct New York’s public safety resources. A full analysis of emergency calls for service data, broken into clear categories, can illuminate a range of additional opportunities to reallocate resources more effectively. That is typically the starting point for the Policing Project’s work elsewhere.
Pursuing innovative, tailored 911 and emergency response solutions frees up police to better handle high-stakes situations. It’s one reason why a growing number of law enforcement leaders are themselves speaking out in favor of alternative response programs. Cities should heed their advocacy — and avoid dismissing all alternative response simply because there are some issues best left to police.