By Usha Lee McFarling

Attendees at the 2023 AHCJ conference in St. Louis were the first to get a look at a plan to radically transform the region’s 911 system — part of an ongoing effort by a group called Forward Through Ferguson to promote racial equity in a region roiled by racial strife since the 2014 killing of an 18-year-old Black man, Michael Brown, Jr., by a white police officer. 

While 911 is considered the “front door to the nation’s public health system, the fact that armed police answer calls leads to far less safety — harm, arrest, or even death — of many of the Black, brown, disabled, poor, and people with mental illness who are the focus of calls, Jia Lian Yang, Forward Through Ferguson’s director of storytelling and communications told attendees. 

Work on analyzing issues with the region’s 911 system started in earnest after St. Louis resident Bade Ali Jabir, a Sudanese father of four who had survived two civil wars and had multiple mental health issues, was killed by police answering a 911 call. “What happened to Ali Jabir isn’t an isolated incident,” Yang said. In their project Transforming 911, Yang’s group has spent years analyzing the region’s 911 system and holding community listening sessions so people could tell their own, sometimes harrowing “911 stories.” 

Karishma Furtado, the group’s director of data and research and one of the report’s co-authors, analyzed 1.7 million 911 calls and found that most were for non-criminal issues, and 80% of calls were not for major crimes. She also found that of 219 codes used to classify calls, only four pertained to mental health issues, despite the fact that mental health was the reason for many calls. 

These findings, she said, suggest that communities would be better served by having 911 responders that are not armed police, but are instead community-based responders trained to deal with behavioral health. The report also recommended that 911 services be placed in public safety departments rather than police departments and that dispatchers be classified as first responders so they can better respond to calls without fears of legal liability. 

Furtado said the 911 system as it currently exists is dangerous to Black lives and needs to be restructured. Her findings are not surprising, she said, as the system was created in  response to Black civil rights protests in the 1960s. 

“Who is 911 intended to protect and from who is an important question,” she said. 

The group plans to release its full report in April. 

Usha Lee McFarling is a national science correspondent for STAT. She was a 2023 AHCJ-California Health Journalism Fellow.