A de Blasio-era homeless outreach program has quietly cut its operations in half in the last year due to a city hiring freeze that has left the program understaffed.
The city’s Co-Response teams, jointly operated by the Health Department and NYPD, launched in 2016 to deescalate people in mental health crisis by pairing clinicians with police, a model that has been explored in several new permutations under Mayor Eric Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul. In recent years, as Adams and Hochul have unveiled a cascade of other pilot programs, the co-response teams have faltered, reaching just 391 people in the last fiscal year, a 39% drop from the year prior.
The downward trend continued between July and October, falling close to 5% compared to the same period the year before, according to the Preliminary Mayor’s Management Report. At just 106 encounters in four months, the city is not on track to reach its goal of serving 500 people in the current fiscal year.
The teams have historically consisted of one clinician and two police officers, conducting two shifts around the clock. They currently serve on call to respond to referrals from shelter and other providers in cases through the 988 suicide and crisis hotline involving people in distress, City Hall spokeswoman Allison Maser. But a city hiring freeze has exacerbated a staffing crunch at the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and forced the city to scale back the program, dropping the night shift and deploying fewer vehicles per day, the report says.
“While the Health Department has implemented various efforts to hire more staff, the City’s hiring freeze has posed significant challenges,” the report states.
The problems in the program have been getting worse for more than a year. Staffing shortages were to blame for a drop in services last year too, with the Health Department and NYPD adjusting the program’s hours to enable them to continue to respond to referrals, according to the previous mayor’s management report.
While the co-response program has thinned out, Adams has rolled out a new set of homeless outreach programs to try to address the unmet mental health needs of people living on the streets and subways. In October, he announced the city was launching a new type of “co-response” team known as Partnership Assistance for Transit Homelessness, or PATH, that would pair police with nurses and social workers from the Department of Homeless Services and New York City Health + Hospitals, the public hospital system, an entity separate from the Health Department.
Those teams were announced as a complement to another subway outreach initiative called Subway Co-Response Outreach Teams, or SCOUT, directed by the state to pair police with mental health practitioners. That program received $20 million, Hochul announced in March, with plans to expand to ten teams by the end of 2024. Both PATH and SCOUT differ from the Health Department’s Co-Response team in that those teams target the subways on a roving basis, rather than being on-call.
The Health Department’s Co-Response team has been under a so-called 2-to-1 hiring freeze since February 2024, meaning for every two empty positions, the Health Department may hire one, Maser said. To fill those gaps, the city is building up other agency co-response programs, like PATH and SCOUT, she said.
“There is no one-size-fits-all approach to addressing street homelessness and severe mental illness, and our co-response teams are just one tool in our toolkit to address these crises,” Maser said.
