Alliance Alert: ’s B-HEARD program was designed to provide a health-centered alternative to police responses for mental health and substance use emergencies. While its creation was an important step forward, its limited scope, lack of transparency, and exclusion of peers from leadership and workforce roles have left it far from its promise.
The Alliance for Rights and Recovery believes that must strengthen and expand B-HEARD by:
- Ensuring peers with lived experience play a direct role in both crisis teams and program management
- Expanding to all NYC neighborhoods, operating 24/7, 365 days a year
- Offering greater transparency and clear responsibility for services
- Prioritizing the program’s mission of providing health-based, not police-led, responses
We are encouraged by City Council’s calls for improvement and by mayoral front-runner Zohran Mamdani’s pledge to expand, overhaul, and fully fund the program—including adding peers to teams and management—if elected. This aligns with the recent state budget, which established $6 million for Daniel’s Law pilot programs across and created the Behavioral Health Crisis Technical Assistance Center. These initiatives mark an important shift toward replacing police-led responses with effective, community-based, health-centered approaches.
But to truly succeed, City and State must have the courage to invest in peer-led crisis alternatives that treat people with dignity and compassion while reducing over-reliance on law enforcement for situations that do not require police involvement.
The Alliance will continue to fight for these reforms. Join us at our Annual Conference, where we will host a panel on peer-led crisis response as an alternative to police involvement. This is a must-attend session for everyone committed to building safer, healthier, and more just responses to behavioral health emergencies.
Unbreakable! Harnessing Our Power, Building Our Resilience, Inspiring Hope and Courage
Alliance for Rights and Recovery 43rd Annual Conference
Villa Roma Resort and Conference Center | September 29-October 1, 2025
Register Today
Mamdani Pledges to Reform City’s Fraught Mental Health Crisis Response Pilot
By Amanda D’Ambrosio | ’s Health Pulse | September 10, 2025
Mayoral front-runner Zohran Mamdani is doubling down on a promise to overhaul a pilot program that sends EMTs and social workers to mental health emergencies instead of police. But the jury is still out on whether that program is working.
The Behavioral Health Emergency Assistance Response Division, or B-Heard, is a crisis response program that sends two EMTs and a mental health worker to certain 911 calls involving an individual in distress. The program launched in 2021 to ensure that such crises were treated as health issues rather than public safety concerns, but it has faced scrutiny over its limited success by elected officials and health advocates because it operates during limited hours and is active in less than half of the city’s police precinct areas.
Mamdani is pledging to change that if elected mayor. His B-Heard overhaul would place teams in every city neighborhood (right now, they’re only set up in 31 of the city’s 78 police precincts), add two or three teams to communities with the highest need and include peers with lived mental health experience in the workforce. The new version of the program would increase funding for the pilot program, which has a $35 million annual budget, by 150% and move it under Mamdani’s planned Department of Community Safety, a new $1 billion agency that would aim to reduce reliance on law enforcement to attend to mental health emergencies, his plan says.
“What’s frustrating is that we have evidence of approaches that work, but they are not operating at the scale that they could be,” Mamdani said in a Monday interview with Spectrum News, pointing to the B-Heard program. He added that the limited success of the program is in part because it is underfunded and “completely deprioritized” by the current administration.
Many details about Mamdani’s plan to reform B-Heard remain unclear, including the structure of response teams and total funding. A spokesperson for the Mamdani campaign did not respond to questions from ’s about the specifics of the Democratic nominee’s plan to reform B-Heard, nor how much the overhaul is estimated to cost.
B-Heard has been subject to scrutiny from the City Council and mental health advocates for its limited progress and lack of transparency since it launched. Crisis response teams failed to respond to more than a third of the 37,000 calls that fell within their jurisdiction between 2022 and 2024, according to a released by City Comptroller Brad Lander, representing the program’s narrow scope and limited effectiveness.
Mental health advocates have welcomed reforms to the B-Heard program, but some argue that it should no longer exist in its current form. The program has long been flawed because it is operated by a handful of city agencies, including Health + Hospitals, the fire department, the police department and the Mayor’s Office of Community Mental Health – a reality that has led programs like this to be “funded to fail,” said Beth Haroules, senior staff attorney at the Civil Liberties Union.
“At the end of the day, everyone might be at the table, but it’s nobody’s responsibility,” Haroules said.
Haroules has advocated for the city to dismantle B-Heard and instead build a model that relies on peer workers and is embedded within the city’s larger mental health system.