Zohran Mamdani Wants Social Workers Responding to 911 Calls — But Test Program Is Already Failing
Mayor-elect Zohram Mamdani wants to deploy social workers instead of police officers to respond to 911 calls — but the controversial plan has already been operating in the Big Apple and is failing.
The early results of a program dubbed B-HEARD spells trouble for Mamdani’s proposed $1.1 billion Department of Community Safety (DCS), a signature imitative that his newly announced chief of staff and left-hand woman Elle Bisgaard-Church helped craft.
B-HEARD launched in 2021 as a pilot program and only operates in some city neighborhoods, but a bleak audit conducted in May by the city comptroller found it was limping — with a whopping 60% of calls deemed ineligible while more than 35% of eligible calls from mental health professionals never got a response.
“Calls were considered potentially dangerous, were ineligible because a mental health professional was already at the scene, or were unable to be triaged because FDNY EMS did not take the call or all necessary information could not be collected about the person in distress,” the comptroller’s office wrote in a news release at the time.
Between fiscal years 2022 and 2024, the program received a total of 96,291 calls — 24,071 of those received a response from a “B-HEARD Team” which consists of two FDNY officers and EMTS, and one social worker. (Read more from “Zohran Mamdani Wants Social Workers Responding to 911 Calls — But Test Program Is Already Failing” HERE)
