The mayor’s office and City Council made a joint announcement, Monday. This year, the city will invest $37 million towards services for the mentally ill. $23 million of that will go toward adding personnel who respond to 911 calls involving the mentally ill. Advocates say the goal is preventing deadly interactions with the NYPD.

“We got the mayor to bring back a task force in 2018 on the crisis prevention and response task force that was supposed to look at not only how to respond to these crisis, but how to prevent them in the first place,” said Carla Rabinowitz, an advocacy coordinator for Communities for Crisis Interventions Teams in NYC.

According to the mayor's office, the task force helped develop many of the strategies that will be implemented. Among them is the addition of several response teams that will include various combinations of clinicians, case workers, police officers and everyday citizens who’ve experienced a mental health challenge. The city says it’s the first time mental health professionals will be part of the city’s response to 911 calls. Some who’ve been advocating for change say the proposal is missing a key component.

“He focused on old items, old thoughts. He focused on co-response teams with police and social workers going to crisis calls, but our problem is this: we don’t want police involved,“ Rabinowitz said.

Anthony Posada of The Legal Aid Society echoed this concern, saying, “We must further expand the non-law enforcement responses to calls for help and move away from relying on police intervention when what is needed are the services of trained mental health experts.“

Dr. Darrin Porcher, a retired NYPD Lieutenant who once worked as a Police Academy instructor, says he’s skeptical the plan will work.

“It’s like putting a Band-Aid on a dam, so we need a more comprehensive solution as opposed to just throwing money to the wind and applying it to the NYPD,” said Dr. Porcher.

Another component of the mayor's proposal would change how the NYPD refers to such calls. Currently, they’re referred to as EDP, emotionally disturbed person calls. The proposal seeks to reclassify them as "mental health calls."

An NYPD spokesperson told NY1, “There are a number of proposals, including terminology, that we are taking under review.”

According to the mayor's office, the implementation of the plan begins immediately.