Governor Maura Healey’s latest spending plan lands hard on one of Massachusetts’ most talked-about public safety experiments, with a proposal to cut roughly $15 million from the state’s jail-diversion effort and shrink co-responder grants to about $4 million. The program pairs police officers with licensed clinicians in real time during behavioral health crises, a model supporters credit with fewer arrests, fewer needless hospital runs and, over time, lower costs. The reduction is tucked into Healey’s roughly $63.4 billion blueprint for the coming fiscal year and has set off a wave of concern among police chiefs and mental health advocates.
What Healey Would Cut
As reported by the Boston Herald, Healey’s proposal would drop funding for the Department of Mental Health’s jail-and-arrest diversion initiatives from about $19.1 million to roughly $4 million. Police leaders say a cut of that size would mean fewer clinicians riding with or responding alongside officers, less training, and more crisis work shoved back onto already stretched patrol units.
A Department of Mental Health spokesperson told the paper that the lower figure is essentially a reset to pre-pandemic funding levels and said the agency remains committed to alternatives to incarceration, even if the line item is slimmer.
How The Program Works
Department of Mental Health data show the agency awarded roughly $16.7 million in grants in fiscal 2024 to 117 diversion projects across the state. Those dollars support co-response teams, regional training centers and other initiatives designed to steer people in crisis toward treatment instead of a holding cell.
The report describes how embedded clinicians join officers on scene, assess what is really going on, and connect people with services that might keep them stable and out of the criminal legal system. Local departments have used the grants over the past several years to stand up co-responder programs and train officers, building up infrastructure that chiefs now say is at risk of being hollowed out.
By The Numbers
The Herald also reports that an expanded investment in fiscal 2025 helped support more than 29,000 documented crisis interventions statewide. According to those figures, more than 3,300 people were diverted from arrest and over 6,500 emergency department visits were avoided, with an estimated $42.8 million in savings tied to those outcomes.
Local officials, including Watertown’s police department, have pointed to roughly 401 co-response interventions in 2025 and six-figure savings as tangible proof that the model works. Michael Bradley of the Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association has been out front urging lawmakers to restore the full funding, warning that cutting the program will push more people into emergency rooms, drive up avoidable arrests and ultimately cost the state more down the line.
Advocates Press The Case
Mental health advocates and service providers say the proposed cut is penny-wise and pound-foolish. They argue that in a state already struggling with access to behavioral health care, pulling back on a program that brings clinicians directly to people in crisis will make things worse, not better.
NAMI Massachusetts is calling for roughly $21.5 million in annualized funding for the jail-diversion effort in its fiscal 2026 budget priorities, citing past returns of multiple dollars in savings for every dollar spent on co-responder teams and related initiatives. The group and its allies are gearing up to lean on lawmakers as the budget moves into the legislative arena.
What’s Next
Healey’s plan is the opening salvo in a months-long budget fight on Beacon Hill, not the final word. The Legislature can restore the jail-diversion money in full, trim it further or rework the line item entirely before a final spending plan hits the governor’s desk.
Between now and then, police chiefs, mental health providers and advocacy groups say they will be working the phones and the halls of the State House, pressing to preserve or rebuild co-responder capacity across Massachusetts before what they see as a quiet line-item cut turns into louder problems on the street.
