Dakota County Crisis Response Unit — 911 Integration
Program: Crisis Response Unit (CRU) — 911 dispatch integration function Launched: Pre-2021 (expanded under 2021 state mandate) Institutional home: Dakota County government (county behavioral health) Location: Inside the Dakota 911 call center Coverage: Operational during crisis line hours; full 24/7 not publicly confirmed Staff: Mental health professionals from the county Crisis Response Unit
What Dakota County Built
Dakota County is the most documented implementation of Minnesota’s approach to mental health dispatch integration: mental health professionals from the county’s Crisis Response Unit are physically staffed inside the Dakota 911 call center. When a person dials 911 for a mental health emergency, “they reach a dispatch that is staffed with trained emergency dispatchers as well as mental health professionals from the county’s Crisis Response Unit, to help route the call to the right responder.”[0]
The CRU professionals in the 911 center are county behavioral health employees — not contracted clinical staff from an external organization, and not 911 center employees. They are county mental health workers who work inside the 911 dispatch environment, giving them both clinical training and access to county behavioral health records and case histories. This records access changes what the dispatch function can do: a clinician who can see whether a caller is already connected to county services can route a repeat caller to their existing case manager rather than dispatching any field response.
The 83% Figure
Brent Anderson, operations director for Dakota 911, has reported that 83% of mental health calls handled through the integrated dispatch system do not require law enforcement field response — resolved at the call level.[1]
This figure — 83% resolution without law enforcement dispatch — is program-reported and covers the entire dispatch-level function, not a subset of calls. It means that of the mental health calls reaching the CRU professionals in the 911 center, 83% are handled entirely by phone: de-escalated, connected to resources, or otherwise resolved without sending police or a field team.
The 83% figure is the highest published diversion rate from a county-level embedded dispatch program in available documentation. Dakota County’s specific model — county behavioral health staff with records access physically staffed in the 911 center — is the design that produces this outcome. Programs relying on dispatcher training without embedded clinical staff produce significantly lower capture and diversion rates, as documented in the LEAP/CAP/NYU joint report.[2]
The Communication Foundation
Anderson attributed the program’s success to relationship-building rather than design alone: “I think because we’ve had such good, open communication, and we talk things through, I think that’s the foundation of why things are working.”[3]
The practical meaning: before mental health professionals arrived in the 911 center, Dakota County built relationships between the dispatch and behavioral health organizations. Dispatchers understand what CRU professionals can handle and trust the clinical judgment they bring to calls. CRU professionals understand the 911 environment and the dispatcher’s perspective. The institutional trust produces higher willingness to route calls to clinical staff rather than defaulting to police.
The LEAP/CAP/NYU report identified this relationship-building as the implementation variable that programs with high capture rates share: not just technical routing design, but deliberate investment in the working relationship between dispatchers and clinical staff.[4]
State Policy Context
Dakota County’s model gained visibility as Minnesota’s 2021 state law — requiring dispatchers to refer mental health calls to trained crisis responders where available — produced compliance across 85 of the state’s 87 counties. Dakota County was among the best-performing implementations before the law and became a reference point for how county compliance could look at high quality.
The 2021 mandate created floor-level requirements; it did not standardize implementation design. Counties with stronger behavioral health infrastructure and more deliberate institutional investment — like Dakota County — produced embedded models with high published diversion rates. Counties with less infrastructure produced compliance through routing protocols without embedded staff, producing lower capture rates.
The contrast makes Dakota County useful as a benchmark: a county-government implementation with no major city, operating through county behavioral health, producing 83% diversion rates through embedded staff and institutional relationship-building.
Replication in Minnesota
Dakota County’s documented success has contributed to replication across Minnesota counties. By 2023, 85 of 87 counties were referring mental health crisis calls to trained professionals following the 2021 mandate. Anderson noted that other counties had adopted similar approaches after the state law created the mandate and Dakota County’s results provided a working model.[5]
The state mandate reduced the primary political obstacle — whether to build the routing function at all — and the Dakota County example provided a county-government design template that others could adapt. The replication pattern illustrates a dynamic the national field has not fully replicated: a state mandate shifts the question from “should we build this?” to “how do we build this well?” Dakota County’s model provided one answer to the second question for counties without large urban behavioral health systems to draw on.
The remaining two non-compliant counties as of 2023 represent the outer edge of the mandate’s reach — jurisdictions where “where available” means the trained crisis responders don’t yet exist, regardless of what the law requires.
What Dakota County Has Not Published
Detailed breakdown of call types handled by CRU in the 911 center
Individual caller outcome data
Full coverage hours documentation (whether 24/7 or limited hours)
Budget figures for the embedded CRU function specifically
The primary published evidence is Anderson’s reported 83% diversion rate and the description of CRU professionals physically staffed in the 911 center. Granular program data is not publicly available.
Sources
[1] Brent Anderson, operations director, Dakota 911: KSTP reporting, “More Minnesota counties are sending mental health professionals to 911 callers in crisis,” https://kstp.com/kstp-news/top-news/more-minnesota-counties-are-sending-mental-health-professionals-to-911-callers-in-crisis/
[2] LEAP/CAP/NYU joint report: “When Launching A Community Responder Program, Don’t Forget About How The Calls Are Dispatched.” Dispatcher hesitancy, capture rate variation across models.
[3] Brent Anderson, operations director, Dakota 911: KSTP reporting, “More Minnesota counties are sending mental health professionals to 911 callers in crisis,” https://kstp.com/kstp-news/top-news/more-minnesota-counties-are-sending-mental-health-professionals-to-911-callers-in-crisis/
[4] LEAP/CAP/NYU joint report: “When Launching A Community Responder Program, Don’t Forget About How The Calls Are Dispatched.” Dispatcher hesitancy, capture rate variation across models.
[5] Brent Anderson, operations director, Dakota 911: KSTP reporting, “More Minnesota counties are sending mental health professionals to 911 callers in crisis,” https://kstp.com/kstp-news/top-news/more-minnesota-counties-are-sending-mental-health-professionals-to-911-callers-in-crisis/