Lee questions Tisch on Be Heard and 988 call data
Lee asks about Be Heard program coordination and 988 mental health hotline numbers. Tisch reports 204 911 calls qualified for 988 referral in the first 16 days, and provides Be Heard data showing 17,961 calls requested but only 1,411 responded to in the first four months of 2026.
And my last question, I'll pause.
I have more, but I want to pass it off to the chair and other members.
But in terms of the Be Heard, and it's more of a comment, but do you have lots of thoughts on Be Heard, as I know Commissioner, Councilmember Caban has.
But in terms of the coordination, I think that's always been the frustration, as well as the fact that it is hard to hire up, staff up for that.
And it's more of FDNY EMS, which we'll go into later this afternoon.
But just wanted to know, in general, for folks that are experiencing mental health crisis, I know that we have 988 now, which hopefully more people are utilizing.
Yes, people are using it.
Okay, and just wanted to know what the numbers look like there in terms of if a call comes in to you all in 911, and then how does that get transferred, referred, how successful are those transfers?
So between, you're talking specifically for 988 or you're talking about for Be Heard?
For both, yeah.
Okay, so let's start with 988 because I'm there on that page.
Between program inception on April 14th of this year through April 30th.
All of my data here ends April 30th.
So I guess for the first 16 days, 204 911 calls qualified for referral to 988 mental health resources.
And then on Be Heard.
Let's see.
All right, so at 911, we get about 4.3 million calls.
for service each year.
Of those, the emotionally disturbed persons, nonviolent, no weapons, 85,793.
So of the overall calls for service, approximately 2% are divertible to
Be heard.
Okay, now I'll give you the numbers for this year.
There were 17, so between January and April, first four months of the year,
There were 17,961 calls where Be Heard was requested.
Is that right, was requested?
Where Be Heard was requested.
They responded to 1,411 of them
So that is 7.9% of the calls that they were requested to respond to.
Is that a lack of the teams that they have?
You have to ask FDNY.
Okay, I'll definitely ask them, but I...
Point is, the 911, NYPD's role in this is the 911 call taker, who is an NYPD employee,
determines that the call is eligible to be transferred, to be heard, and then it goes outside of the NYPD's
universe.