988 and BH Link are Rhode Island’s main non-police routes for a mental health crisis, and the bill to write them into law and guarantee their funding passed the Senate but died in the House.
A new book argues that when someone dials 911 in the middle of a mental health crisis, the system is built to send a cop. Rebecca Neusteter, executive director of the University of Chicago Health Lab, makes that case in 911, What’s Your Emergency?, published Sept. 15 by The New Press, and she laid it out again in an edited Q&A with The Marshall Project on October 16, arguing that 911 has long defaulted to police and that dispatch is governed in a way that favors law enforcement.
That is her argument about the country, and I read it as hers. The more useful question for anyone living between Woonsocket and Westerly is what Rhode Island has actually built around that default, and the answer is a set of parallel tracks – a 988 lifeline, a network of community clinics with mobile crisis teams, and a handful of police departments riding with clinicians – laid side by side like strands of linguine that do not always touch, while the bill meant to write the lifeline into law and guarantee its money died in the House in June…