Today, LDF sent a letter to the New York City Council Committee on Finance, Committee on Mental Health, Disabilities and Addiction, and Committee on Health urging to Council to prioritize funding for community-based responders for people with behavioral and mental health disabilities and those in crisis in the Executive Budget for Fiscal Year 2026. As the letter outlines, it is imperative that City Council fund the necessary components of a community-based mental and behavioral health system including call centers that can resolve most calls for help, mobile crisis teams to respond staffed by an array of professionals and peers than can connect people to services, and places to go in the short term as well as long term services that promote stabilization. Funding for these programs is crucial to prevent police encounters for New Yorkers with mental and behavioral health disabilities and also ensures the City is meeting its obligations to New Yorkers with disabilities under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
LDF’s Framework for Public Safety outlines how communities can develop an alternative system and advance a plan for effective, equitable, and humane public safety structures. This includes 1. Building a corps of unarmed civilian responders, 2. Expanding and institutionalizing restorative justice programs, and 3. Increasing investments in community resources and ensuring economic security. Within this framework, LDF calls for local governments to build a corps of unarmed responders to serve as alternatives to law enforcement for mental and behavioral health crises. However, to be effective, these alternatives must be adequately funded. New York City must make accessible, affordable, comprehensive, culturally competent, and trauma-informed behavioral health and substance use services available to all New Yorkers in the communities in which they live
Read the full letter here.
