Mayor Zohran Mamdani has reversed a plan from his predecessor that would have stripped the FDNY of its role in B-HEARD, New York City's program for responding to mental health crisis calls. The move keeps the Fire Department's emergency medical workers paired with public hospital clinicians on eligible 911 calls, undoing a restructuring that former Mayor Eric Adams announced on November 14, 2025.
Under Adams's plan, B-HEARD would have been fully operated and managed by NYC Health + Hospitals, with FDNY EMTs previously assigned to the program reassigned to other emergency response units, according to a NYC Health + Hospitals announcement, which said the new model was expected to take effect in the spring of 2026. That overhaul never fully took hold. Mamdani officials revoked the Adams order, restoring joint operation between FDNY and the hospital system rather than handing the program entirely to Health + Hospitals, as Gothamist reported.
Gothamist reported on March 31, 2026, that Mamdani's administration had revoked Adams's B-HEARD transfer order, before Crain's New York Business reported that FDNY would keep running the program. The change puts B-HEARD back under the structure it launched with in 2021: two EMT workers paired with a mental health professional responding to eligible 911 mental health calls that don't involve violence or weapons as the primary concern, according to the Mayor's Office of Community Mental Health. POLITICO similarly reported that Mamdani's order resurrects the program's original structure, involving both FDNY EMS personnel and public hospital employees.
How B-HEARD Operates Across the City
City materials describe B-HEARD teams working seven days a week, 16 hours a day, across 31 precincts in four boroughs, per the Mayor's Office of Community Mental Health. The program dispatches health professionals in response to 911 calls about mental health emergencies, a framing POLITICO's newsletter also used in describing its function.
NYC Health + Hospitals has said that between the program's 2021 launch and June 2025, B-HEARD teams responded to nearly 35,000 mental health 911 calls. The agency also reported that among patients assessed by one of its clinicians, 43 percent were served in the community instead of being transported to a hospital emergency department.
Disputed Numbers on Missed Calls
How well B-HEARD has actually performed depends on which agency's figures you trust. A city comptroller audit found that the program's teams failed to respond to more than one-third of eligible mental health calls, with police sent instead, according to the same Gothamist report that detailed the staffing reversal. A separate, lower-confidence excerpt from that comptroller audit states that more than 14,000 calls deemed eligible for a B-HEARD team went unanswered because they came in overnight, when the pilot did not operate.
More recent figures diverge sharply depending on the source. The FDNY said the program responded to 2,020 of the 2,058 calls the department deemed eligible during the first four months of the year, according to Gothamist's reporting on the dispute. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, however, said B-HEARD responded to just 1,411 of nearly 18,000 calls that dispatchers flagged as potentially eligible over that same stretch — a gap the outlet noted the two agencies have not reconciled. Independent Budget Office figures cited by Gothamist show responses peaking at about 870 calls a month in late 2023 before falling to roughly 350 a month by early 2025.
A Program With a Troubled Lineage
B-HEARD's structural back-and-forth comes against the backdrop of the city's uneven history with mental health crisis infrastructure. The city opened a support and connection center in East Harlem in 2020, and Adams later added a second center in the Bronx in 2022, but that location closed due to low traffic, Gothamist reported. The de Blasio-era Thrive initiative, a broader predecessor effort, spent more than $1 billion over six years while facing widespread criticism over a lack of transparency and unclear goals, per the same outlet's account.
Former city comptroller Scott Stringer, described by Gothamist as a political adversary of the mayor, has compared Mamdani's Office of Community Safety effort to Thrive. The comparison underscores the scrutiny facing any administration that tries to reshape how the city handles mental health emergencies, a space where staffing structures, funding, and results have shifted repeatedly across mayoral terms.
