Every person deserves equal, effective treatment and safety, especially when in crisis. In such a vulnerable circumstance, people need professionals trained to provide support and care.

But too often, when a person is experiencing a mental health crisis, 911 dispatchers send armed police officers as a default response. We don’t send armed police when someone is experiencing a heart attack, but we do when a person is experiencing suicidal ideation. That doesn’t make sense.

Professor Jessica Gillooly, a former call-taker and expert on 911 dispatch, explains the problem to us this way: “Too often, 911 call-takers send police to calls because of a lack of timely, robust alternatives. The goal should be creating a 911 system that provides call-takers the tools and training to send the right response at the right time.”

The good news is that many jurisdictions have begun to consider incorporating trained civilian crisis responders into their emergency response systems. This approach offers significant improvements for public safety: Routing calls away from the police can reduce police use of force, escalation of situations that could have been stabilized by trained mental health providers, violence against people with disabilities, and unnecessary arrests that entangle people in the criminal justice system.

But that is only half of it.

911 dispatchers make crucial, frontline decisions every day about how to respond to emergencies. They are important partners in ensuring that all community members receive safety and equal treatment. Successful diversion programs require that 911 call-takers are empowered, through adequate technology and training, to make appropriate decisions about when to send crisis response teams instead of the police.

Crisis response teams should have adequate staffing and resources so that they are able to respond in a timely manner to all behavioral health crisis calls. This prevents situations in which 911 call-takers default to police officers because crisis response teams are unavailable.

Trained behavioral health professionals should also staff 911 dispatch centers to stabilize callers while they wait for a team to arrive. One option is for clinicians to be staffed at the dispatch center. Another is to integrate emergency response systems with the new 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

The American Rescue Plan provides states funding for crisis call centers, crisis response teams, and crisis stabilization centers.

The training for 911 operators must recognize the costs and safety concerns of unnecessarily sending police officers to situations that they are not trained to handle, including risks of escalation, use of force, infringement on the civil liberties of community members, and resulting entanglement in the criminal justice system.

The training for 911 operators should include examples of questions probing the level of risk posed by the situation the caller describes. For example, if the caller reports an attempted break-in at a residence, as occurred in the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr., 911 call-takers should be empowered to ask the caller the basis for assuming that the subject of the call does not live there. The dispatch software should include a way to capture callers’ uncertainty about the level of risk.

For medical emergencies, call-takers often have checklists and question scripts to help standardize patient risk assessments. A similar list of factors to consider would help 911 call-takers decide which first responder to dispatch. Some jurisdictions are already piloting this approach.

911 systems must create clear criteria for which situations qualify for behavioral health responses, so that the response doesn’t vary depending on which call-taker answers the phone. Two common examples of incident types that are likely to be appropriate for a crisis response team instead of police officers include a subset of calls about an “emotionally disturbed person” or a “welfare check.”

The 911 system should develop protocols to respond to a caller who specifically asks for a behavioral health response or guide the caller to consider whether their emergency warrants such a response. For example, 911 call-takers in Austin answer calls with the question: “Are you calling for police, fire, EMS, or mental health services?”

Finally, feedback and data collection (while respecting privacy) are important to evaluate performance and areas to improve.

The 911 system is a crucial component of an effective behavioral health crisis response system, which requires someone to call, someone to respond, and somewhere to go. A person experiencing a mental health crisis should be able to call for help with de-escalation, receive on-site assistance from trained mental health professionals, and go to a 24-hour crisis stabilization facility — just as those experiencing physical health crises can. Reforming the 911 system is the first step for a functioning crisis response system. We need to send the right response at the right time.

In May 2020, a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on the neck of George Floyd for nine and a half minutes, ending his life. Nearly three years later, starting this week, United Nations experts on racial justice will embark on a first-of-its-kind visit to the United States to examine what has — and hasn’t — changed since George Floyd’s murder sparked a nationwide movement for Black lives.

Unfortunately, while calls for reform grew louder after Floyd’s murder, concrete action has failed to materialize and Black people continue to face the brunt of police brutality. In January, five Memphis officers beat Tyre Nichols to death in a relentless, extended assault. In June 2022, eight officers in Akron, Ohio fired a total of 94 shots, 46 of which hit and killed Jayland Walker. Countless other Black people have been targeted by police for simply going about their daily lives.

Two years ago, then-U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michele Bachelet warned of “insufficient” police reforms playing out across the country. Like many cities, Memphis and Akron both adopted packages of “reforms” after the widespread 2020 protests against police brutality. But these modest changes were not enough to prevent needless violence at the hands of police.

Deadly police violence is a national crisis in the United States. It happens in every part of the country, from California to New England, from Minnesota to Texas. Fatal shootings by police kill Americans literally every day, averaging three people per day since 2015. Despite years of protests and greater public awareness, the number of people shot to death by police has increased every year since Michael Brown was killed in 2014, with an average of 1011 official homicides yearly from 2015-2022, and a death toll exceeding 8,000 souls. This scale of death by police happens in no other nation on earth. These extrajudicial killings represent a massive human rights violation that falls most heavily on Black people, who are killed by police at more than twice the rate of white Americans.

Civil society groups from across the country pleaded with the United Nations Human Rights Council to take a leading role in investigating systemic racism in U.S. policing systems. In April 2021, the Expert Mechanism to Advance Racial Justice and Equality in law enforcement (EMLER) was created, with a mandate to examine excessive use of force, over-policing, racial profiling, and other human rights violations by U.S. law enforcement, including their roots in slavery and colonialism. For the first time, experts from this mechanism will hear from victims, families, and officials about how the human rights violations they have been documenting for two years impact communities in the U.S.

The U.N. experts will visit six U.S. cities, including Atlanta, Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, Washington, D.C., and New York City. They will hear from local and national government officials, law enforcement representatives, civil society organizations and grassroots groups, academics, and victims of police brutality and their families. Following the two-week visit, EMLER will recommend reforms to bring police conduct into line with recognized human rights standards.

With Congress locked in a kind of moral paralysis, this visit must produce an in-depth and objective examination of how historic patterns of discrimination affect policing in America and lay out a clear path for authorities to radically reform law enforcement and ensure it effectively protects all communities equally.

One of us, Collette Flanagan, addressed the Human Rights Council in Geneva last year, in memory of her son, Clinton Allen, who was killed by Dallas police 10 years ago. She closed by affirming that while “police forces … are almost a world power in themselves,” those who speak out are a power as well. Our hope is that this panel of independent international experts will help us to make our appeal irresistible.