Tulsa's 911 center has spent the past two years routing mental health crisis calls away from police cars and ambulances and toward trained clinicians instead, and city officials say the numbers back up the approach. Dispatchers now connect people in crisis directly with mental health professionals around the clock, a shift local and state leaders describe as working — even as they acknowledge Oklahoma's broader mental health system still has serious cracks.
The city expanded its embedded clinician model in 2024, committing to a fully staffed, 24/7 operation inside the 911 center through what's known as the PSC/COPES Call Diversion Program, according to the City of Tulsa. The city says the partnership has diverted more than 6,600 calls away from traditional first-responder response and generated an estimated $450,000 in public safety savings. Separately, Tulsa World reports the 911 diversion program has generated more than $500,000 in estimated savings for the city, and that the program has since been adopted by Oklahoma City and Edmond, per Zack Stoycoff.
The city and Tulsa World report the same figures for how much traditional dispatch volume has dropped. Tulsa World and the city's own release report that mental health emergency calls processed through traditional dispatch fell from 11,379 in 2024 to 5,477 in 2025. The trend line points the same direction: fewer mental health calls are landing in the hands of police and fire crews who weren't trained for them.
Clinicians Assess the Vast Majority of Cases They See
The program's day-to-day performance has shown up in monthly snapshots, too. In March 2025, clinicians diverted 562 calls from first responders to mental health workers, representing 86% of the cases they assessed that month, according to Public Radio Tulsa. That same report noted the state initially said it was cutting $895,000 from COPES funding before later agreeing to fund the service through at least June 30 of that year — a reminder that even a program with strong local results has had to fight for its state dollars.
Stoycoff said the program has delivered faster, more compassionate care for people needing mental health intervention than they might previously have received, per the Tulsa World report. He described a model where care is delivered by phone when possible, with field responders deployed for calls that require more than a phone conversation but don't call for a police response. Tulsa, he said, has improved the efficiency of its 911 response as a result.
State Lawmakers Say the Fixes Need to Start Earlier
State Rep. Mark Lawson, who chaired a select committee reviewing mental health finances, said Oklahoma needs to focus on policies that divert people seeking mental and behavioral health care from emergency rooms and jails, according to Oklahoma Voice. Lawson said the state must continue investing to keep people from entering crisis in the first place, and that it carries obligations under a consent decree that settled a 2023 lawsuit alleging people were left to languish in lockups without mental health treatment. He also said more mental health beds have been added in the pediatric space.
The financial stakes behind that push are steep. Oklahoma had about 45,000 mental-health-related emergency room visits in 2025, carrying an estimated cost of roughly $266 million, the outlet reports. The average cost per admission ran about $4,960 for general behavioral health care, $6,450 for substance use disorder, and roughly $7,050 for suicidality — figures Stoycoff said are still climbing.
A System Still Searching for Upstream Fixes
Stoycoff said Oklahoma's direct and indirect costs tied to mental illness exceed $5.6 billion annually, and that the state's struggle to address serious mental illness is worsening homelessness, public safety outcomes and overall quality of life. He added that Oklahoma may need a wholesale rewriting of its mental health system, particularly when it comes to upstream intervention before people ever reach a crisis point.
Mental health professionals attended a forum on the topic, per the same Oklahoma Voice account. Stoycoff said only about 30% of Oklahoma's population currently lives in an area served by a 911 center with immediate access to mental health clinicians — a gap that leaves most of the state without the kind of response Tulsa has built out.
Some new capacity is on the way. OU Health has opened a center in Oklahoma City that was expected to cost $140 million, combining pediatric medical care with psychiatric care for children and adolescents, according to the Oklahoma Voice report. A planned Oklahoma Psychiatric Care Center is also expected to replace the Tulsa Center for Behavioral Health, doubling the public beds currently available for mental health care in northeast Oklahoma and adding a 24-hour crisis response recovery center. Whether those additions, paired with Tulsa's 911 model, add up to a fix for the state's broader access problems remains an open question lawmakers are still wrestling with.
