New York Bets $8 Million on Crisis Teams Without Police

New York's Office of Mental Health has opened a second round of funding for communities that want to answer behavioral health crises with clinicians and peer workers rather than police officers. The state is offering up to $8 million to establish or expand four crisis response teams, with at least one of them required to serve a rural community. Individual applicants can seek as much as $2 million.

The announcement came on Monday, September 21, and it targets a gap that has frustrated families for years: what happens in the first hour of a psychiatric or substance use crisis, when the only number most people can think to call is 911.

Who Can Apply, and Who Already Has

The money is restricted to counties that were left out of the first round of awards in February. Monroe County may apply, but the city of Rochester cannot — it already holds one of the earlier grants. Round one went to Rochester, the Children's Home of Jefferson County and Central Nassau Guidance, each of which received $2 million. Those three pilots are now forming community councils so that people with lived experience can shape the programs from the outset.

The request for proposals seeks four pilot programs, one of them rural. Teams are expected to pair trained behavioral health professionals with peer workers who have lived experience of mental health or substance use challenges, and the state is asking that the programs be trauma-informed, community-based and attentive to racial equity, cultural humility and harm reduction.

The four winning communities have not been named. They will be selected through the application process, which means the map of who gets a crisis team is still open.

What the State Is Actually Building

The funding is one piece of a larger structure that traces back to the Daniel's Law Task Force, the panel that examined how New York could move crisis response toward public health and widen diversion services for people in mental health or substance use crisis.

The state is also standing up a Behavioral Health Crisis Technical Assistance Center, run jointly by the Office of Mental Health and the Office of Addiction Services and Supports and funded with $2 million in the fiscal 2026 budget. Its work is unglamorous but consequential: helping localities draft crisis plans, agree on common response protocols and train the people who will staff them. A state advisory council completes the framework.

Office of Mental Health Commissioner Ann Sullivan said the additional teams would help communities respond safely and compassionately to people in crisis.

For families in New York, the practical significance is narrower than the language suggests. A crisis team does not replace treatment, and it does not create a single new bed. What it can change is the first contact — sending a clinician and a peer instead of an officer, and giving someone in a substance use crisis a route into the treatment system rather than a holding cell. Whether this round produces teams that work will depend on who applies, and on whether the communities that need it most are the ones that win.