When 988 Answers, but No One Can Come
Rhode Island built an impressive front door for people in psychiatric crisis. Dial 988 and the call is answered in-state, around the clock, by trained counselors at BH Link, with one of the best answer rates in the country, near 98 percent. The majority of callers get what they need in that moment without anything further.
That is a real achievement, and the people who built it deserve credit.
But a crisis system is three parts: someone to talk to, someone to respond, and somewhere to go. Rhode Island built the first leg. The second, mobile crisis teams that can go to a person in distress instead of dispatching a patrol car are unevenly distributed across the state.
In much of Rhode Island, the default responder to a mental health emergency is still an armed police officer.
I have taken those calls, and they are a nightmare. An officer trained primarily for enforcement, arriving with a firearm and a duty to take control of a scene, is often the worst-matched tool for a person in the middle of a psychiatric emergency.
Everyone involved tends to know it, including the officer. It is dangerous for the person in crisis, dangerous for the cop, and it quietly turns an illness into a police matter. We would not send an officer to set a broken bone. We send them to this because we have not finished building the alternative.
Part of the reason is money, and the money is precarious. The 988 system is an unfunded federal mandate: Washington required it but did not fund it, so Rhode Island relies on grants.
A long-term funding bill, which would draw on a slice of the surcharge already collected on phone bills for emergency services and would create no new tax, passed the state Senate last session and then stalled in the House.
The mobile crisis capacity that would keep officers out of these calls depends on exactly that kind of stable funding.
Taking these calls off officers’ plates is not an anti-police position. This is not defunding the police. It is a pro-police one. Departments are stretched thin and struggling to fill seats, and every psychiatric call handled by a clinician is an officer freed for the work only an officer can do.
Co-response and clinician-led models are not about pushing police out. They are about matching the responder to the emergency, reserving the badge and the gun for when there is an actual threat.
Rhode Island proved it can build the call center. Now it needs to build the response, secure stable funding, and expand mobile crisis services across the whole state, so that an armed officer is no longer the reflexive answer for someone in the worst hour of their life.
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