Minneapolis has quietly rerouted an average of 10,000 mental health calls a year away from armed police officers since 2021, sending unarmed civilian responders instead. But behind that success, city officials have spent years struggling to get basic financial paperwork from the private contractor running the program, according to internal emails and a city study.
The Behavioral Crisis Response program, staffed by contractor Canopy Roots since its inception, has grown from two supervisors, one program manager, and 14 responders into an operation with nearly 70 full-time employees, including 55 responders, as reported by the Minnesota Star Tribune. Canopy Roots, which began as a startup therapy practice founded by members of a family from Georgia, did not routinely include itemized receipts and payroll records with its invoices, the paper reported. The program now operates 24/7 and has cost the city more than $25 million over five years, ballooning from roughly $2.5 million in its first year to about $5 million today.
City Council Member Aurin Chowdhury emailed then-city operations officer Toddrick Barnette repeatedly seeking basic financial information on Canopy Roots, and Council President Elliott Payne chastised Barnette in April for being unresponsive to standard requests for information, per the Star Tribune's reporting. Luana Nelson-Brown, a city official quoted in the paper, said the city lacked compliance protocols for new programs and contractors, adding that she had questions about every city contract she reviewed, not only the one with Canopy Roots.
Billing Gaps and Shifting Rates
The disparity in what the city paid for staffing has drawn particular attention. Canopy Roots at one point charged an average of $70 per hour for staffing in a single month, while in another month the average dropped to $25 per hour, according to the Star Tribune's review of the contract. The city wanted an explanation for the difference in staffing costs and eventually encouraged Canopy Roots to set a standard staffing rate.
In 2024, the city began requiring Canopy Roots to provide receipts for program supplies such as snacks, clothing, and water, and it stopped reimbursing the contractor for items including sunscreen, menstrual supplies, and vacuum accessories. By September of that year, the city had requested more details on Canopy Roots invoices. The contractor experienced ongoing confusion, unclear communication, and payment delays that nearly caused service interruptions, according to internal emails cited in the report.
Barnette told the Star Tribune that vendors submitting proper documentation were paid, and that the city does not ask Canopy Roots about its contract profits. He also said he did not know that Nelson-Brown had been ordered to pay invoices. Nelson-Brown, for her part, said Canopy Roots received misinformation from other city employees. Barnette said the city put a structure in place for oversight, accountability, and transparency after he arrived in 2023.
Canopy Roots Defends Its Record
Canopy Roots spokesperson Cherie Hanson said the company is proud of its work for the city and confident it can work with Minneapolis to run a new program going forward. Nelson-Brown warned that the behavioral crisis program would halt entirely if the city stopped paying Canopy Roots, underscoring how dependent the city's non-police response infrastructure has become on a single contractor.
A recent city study found that program oversight was hindered by the private contracting of staffing, response protocols, decision-making, and personnel qualifications, and concluded that the city may be funding a critical service without sufficient control over its delivery, providers, and outcomes. The unarmed mental health workers dispatched under the program have been credited with freeing up police officers for other priorities while offering a more humane response to people experiencing mental health crises, and the program has helped Minneapolis move away from relying on armed police for all 911 calls.
Federal Mandates and Field Praise
The program's existence isn't just a matter of local policy preference. In January 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice entered into a court-enforceable federal consent decree with the City of Minneapolis that explicitly required maintaining non-police emergency response options for behavioral health crises to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. That mandate followed federal findings in 2023 that traditional police responses to mental health calls violated Title II of the ADA. During its civil rights investigation, federal investigators conducted ride-alongs with Canopy Roots responders and praised the program for delivering timely and compassionate service, according to reporting from Access Press.
Between its December 2021 launch and late 2025, the program handled nearly 35,000 emergency calls without reporting any serious injuries to recipients or responders, per the Minnesota Women's Press. Responders handle roughly 900 calls a month covering welfare checks, unhoused individuals, and non-violent crises. Minneapolis was also selected in 2024 for the Harvard Kennedy School Government Performance Lab's Alternative 911 Emergency Response Implementation Cohort, an effort to standardize call-outcome data collection and refine performance tracking for the program.
Alternatives and Legal Limits
Not everyone agreed a private contractor was the right structural choice from the start. Hennepin County operates its own 24/7 mobile crisis team, Community Outreach for Psychiatric Emergencies, dispatching licensed clinicians countywide, and local mental health advocates initially urged Minneapolis to expand that county program rather than create a separate municipal contractor model, Access Press has reported. Under Minnesota Statute 245.462, personnel staffing mobile crisis response teams must meet state definitions for qualified mental health professionals or practitioners supervised according to state mental health service standards.
The city's Behavioral Crisis Response teams operate unmarked civilian vans without emergency lights or sirens, and protocols strictly forbid responders from conducting involuntary transportation under any circumstances — emergency transport holds still require calling EMS or police, according to the City of Minneapolis. In August 2025, the Minneapolis City Council unanimously approved a contract extension with Canopy Roots to keep staffing the program while the city prepared for a long-term competitive bidding process.
What Comes Next
Eight companies have now applied to staff the mobile crisis team going forward, and Minneapolis is conducting a competitive bidding process for a company to run the program starting next year. Whichever bidder wins is expected to respond to more calls and conduct more follow-up work with service recipients than the current setup provides.
The bidding process unfolds alongside broader structural changes to how Minneapolis organizes its emergency response system. In February, the city advanced plans for a $38 million Community Safety Training and Wellness Center intended to house shared training facilities for 911, police, fire, and Behavioral Crisis Response personnel under the Office of Community Safety. The push for non-police response options extends beyond mental health calls, too — as Hoodline reported, the city has used a $2.5 million federal Byrne discretionary grant to test civilian responders for traffic crashes and juvenile deflection, part of a goal to raise the share of 911 calls handled without armed officers from 9 percent toward 20 percent.
