After a rocky few years, Mayor Brandon Johnson’s campaign promise of rolling out a non-police mental health response team is at the center of a new media blitz by his administration.
Johnson has posted recent videos of himself riding in the city’s Crisis Assistance Response and Engagement vans and touted a jump in responses since May. Within the next few days, the city also will roll out a second shift into the evening for these roving teams of behavioral health workers and EMTs, a key focus of the freshman mayor’s progressive agenda.
“They told us there was no demand,” Johnson said at his City Club of Chicago address on Wednesday. “But calls increased by 51%.”
Left unsaid was the increase still netted a little more than 100 emergency responses from May to August — an amount the program saw in just one month at its height in years past. It followed a nadir of calls earlier this spring, when a Tribune investigation found CARE dispatches slowed to a crawl amid a perfect storm of bureaucratic mishaps and political infighting within the Johnson administration.
The mayor also didn’t elaborate on who he was calling out for brushing off the “demand” for CARE, although his ex-health commissioner, Dr. Olusimbo “Simbo” Ige, argued just that for months before being forced out of her job in May. She was replaced by Dr. Garth Walker, Johnson’s third head of the Chicago Department of Public Health in this term.
More Top Picks Best Light Blocking Glasses For Migraines
Johnson’s deputy mayor of health and human services, Arturo Carrillo, confirmed to the Tribune that, from May to August, CARE responded to 115 emergency calls, with another 72 dispatches via a “non-urgent” email request channel that has a one- to three-day wait.
“Keep in mind this is a brand new entity of government,” the mayor said when asked by a reporter about CARE’s challenges. “I would love for things to be perfect all the time — trust me, my wife would prefer that, too, in our marriage … but it doesn’t have to be perfect all the time in order for it to work.”
City Council Health Committee Chair Ald. Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez, 33rd, whom Johnson appointed to the leadership post, concurred.
“We have faced roadblocks we didn’t anticipate, and at times the process was slowed down,” she said during a Thursday hearing on CARE. Carrillo then briefed aldermen on lessons learned.
Some of Carrillo’s main takeaways: CARE must be available citywide, interdepartmental coordination is key and dispatch channels need to properly route calls to the mental health teams. The Johnson administration made the program citywide in May and expanded the types of crises that qualify for CARE, Carrillo said. Starting Monday, he added, a second shift will also expand hours of operation from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Not all advocates for mental health response teams think that diagnosis was why there was a bottleneck. Jim Poole, senior policy director at the National Alliance on Mental Illness Chicago, said during the committee meeting that “In Chicago, we see that CARE is not being adequately used and remains largely sidelined.”
“Specialized support like CARE can relieve the burdens on officers and provide better support to the public,” Poole said. “While citywide expansion and covering more hours of the day is important, there are more fundamental issues standing in the way of truly changing how we respond to mental health emergencies.”
One revelation from the hearing: Though Johnson vowed to transition the program away from former Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s pilot model — which included a police officer and a fire paramedic, known as the co-responder — cops have stayed involved in some CARE responses.
“CPD has never stopped supporting the CARE team,” Lt. Rhonda Anderson, Chicago police’s Crisis Intervention Team coordinator, told aldermen. “As of yesterday, (my team has) also done 20 — I know this is a nasty word some of you guys don’t like, but 20 co-responses where they’ve kind of planned ahead and gone to calls together because they felt that teamwork would give a better outcome to our residents.”
Anderson added that in August, Chicago police did an 8-hour training for the CARE team on “de-escalation” tactics. But Johnson, in a Friday news conference, dismissed the idea that those “co-responses” contradict his non-police vision for the mental health response teams and said his administration will “learn from all of these exchanges.”
“Listen, it depends on the circumstance, the situation, right?” Johnson said. “The people of Chicago now have care and treatment, and we are moving away from this historic, degraded, inhumane process of trauma. No more in Chicago. Not as long as I’m mayor.”
Progressives have long clamored for mental health professionals to respond to non-violent 911 calls instead of cops, arguing law enforcement is not the best fit for some of these emergencies. Even more conservative types agree police are often asked to do too much in cash-strapped cities where the need for social services is great.
But the transition under Johnson has been bumpy because of interagency clashes. Besides Ige’s defiance of his senior leadership in ordering her to staff up CARE, Chicago police removed its portable data terminals from the program’s vans last year after CARE fully folded into the Health Department. Before that, CARE vans were frequently unavailable because of insufficient paramedic staffing from the Chicago Fire Department.
Even ahead of Thursday’s hearing, dueling public comments from members of Fire Fighters Local 2, which represents CFD paramedics, and American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 31, which represents CARE EMTs, hit at the labor tension sparked by the shift: No union wants to give up its jobs to another. That bitterness likely also bogged down the transition.
Johnson this summer promised to return the police terminals after the Tribune reported on the dip in calls after their 2025 removal, as those devices were a critical resource for CARE teams to monitor live emergency calls. Carrillo said at the hearing only two channels are live: The Office of Emergency Management and Communications 911 dispatch, or non-urgent email requests.
More Top Picks Best Study Planners For College Students
Daniel Casey, a technology deputy at the Office of Public Safety Administration, said the city’s transition into a Computer-Aided Dispatch (CAD) system that will integrate police, fire and EMS channels into one platform is still in progress. But just like under the traditional police terminal system, neither CARE teams nor Chicago Fire Department personnel will receive the most detailed live updates on the police channel.
It’s unclear how long this CAD transition will take. The contract was first inked in 2019. An internal memo from Johnson’s office to aldermen Sept. 21 said the first phase, known as the “live 911 data simulation period,” would debut the next day.
One thing is certain: Speakers of all political stripes in Thursday’s hearing agreed the need for more mental health care in Chicago is acute. Most aldermen on the Health Committee supported CARE’s mission despite the implementation hurdles.
In a video the city posted online within the past week featuring a CARE van and workers, the mayor says, “Chicago police officers respond to tens of thousands of mental health-related calls when a specialized response for mental or social distress is what’s actually needed.”
“Sometimes police are not the right fit for a mental health crisis,” Johnson said. “CARE steps in to make sure you get compassionate, specialized care when you need it most.”
The city’s presentation shows OEMC decides the vast majority of potential 911 calls are not applicable to CARE, and the ones that are don’t always get a dispatch, however.
In June, out of 2,568 “potentially eligible calls,” 93% of them were screened out after going through dispatch, according to OEMC’s slide. That left 50 calls, of which CARE responded to 12. Another 17 responses came through the 72-hour email request form.
There was improvement by August, however; out of 64 eligible 911 calls, 35 of them elicited a CARE dispatch. Another 26 such dispatches were in response to email requests, and five were requested by police.
At the hearing, Health Department leadership also promised to restore the public dashboard of CARE responses. The Johnson administration took that dashboard down in 2024, when calls slowed drastically, and has not yet restored it, but a “public dashboard draft” shown during the hearing noted the fluctuation in total volume over the years: 55 in 2021, 535 in 2022, 808 in 2023, 243 in 2024, 728 in 2025 and 178 so far this year.
The mayor’s opponents in the 2027 race already are taking shots over the backslide, with Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias launching attack ads last month listing CARE as a broken campaign promise.
But Rodriguez-Sanchez, the City Council’s leading champion of the non-police model of CARE, said in her hearing the local movement for more mental health funding known as the “Treatment Not Trauma” campaign preceded this election cycle, and the one before.
“The CARE initiative did not start in a vacuum, nor did it happen overnight. Its roots go back to 2020, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, when a powerful movement emerged across the country demanding that we reimagine public safety,” she said. “Let’s be honest, we are still going through growing pains … but as with anything that requires a fundamental shift in systems and culture, perseverance is necessary.”