Houston Crisis Call Diversion (CCD)
Program: Crisis Call Diversion (CCD) Launched: 2015 Institutional home: Multi-agency collaboration — Houston Police Department, Houston Fire Department, Harris Center for Mental Health and IDD Location: Inside the Houston Emergency Center (911 call center) Coverage: 6 AM to 10 PM, seven days a week Staff: Licensed mental health professional telecounselors
What Houston Built
Houston’s Crisis Call Diversion program launched in 2015 as one of the earliest embedded dispatch clinician programs in the country. The program places licensed mental health professional telecounselors physically inside the Houston Emergency Center — the city’s combined 911 call center — where they take transferred behavioral health calls and work them to resolution by phone.
When a 911 call comes in with a behavioral health component, the call-taker assesses for immediate safety concerns. If there is no weapon present, no active threat of violence, and no immediate medical emergency, the call transfers to a CCD telecounselor. The telecounselor handles the call — de-escalating, connecting the caller to resources, and resolving by phone whenever possible. The telecounselor can sign off on mental health crisis calls independently, without requiring police clearance to close the call. This independent sign-off capability established CCD as a genuine fourth emergency option alongside police, fire, and EMS, rather than a referral triage layer that still depended on police to close calls.[0]
The program does not operate its own field response. When CCD determines in-person response is needed, it routes to the appropriate existing resource — mobile crisis, EMS, or police if the situation requires law enforcement. CCD’s work is entirely at the call center, entirely by phone.
Organizational Structure
CCD operates under a multi-agency collaboration involving HPD, Houston Fire, and the Harris Center for Mental Health and IDD — the local mental health authority. The telecounselors are Harris Center employees working inside the Houston Emergency Center full-time. This structure preserves the clinical organization’s records infrastructure and clinical supervision while placing staff inside the 911 environment.
Wayne Young, CEO of The Harris Center: “This collaboration not only assists deputies in making informed decisions but also significantly reduces the role of law enforcement in mental health crises.”[1]
The multi-agency structure means governance decisions — expanding hours, adding staff, changing call eligibility — require agreement across HPD, Houston Fire, and the Harris Center. This has advantages (shared investment, multiple organizational champions) and constraints (no single agency controls the program’s expansion).
Outcomes
Between 2016 and 2021, the program diverted nearly 7,500 calls from law enforcement response and saved more than 11,000 police hours, according to Houston CIT program documentation.[2] By 2020, the program generated approximately $1.67 million in annual savings — calculated against the difference between a diverted call and the 104 minutes officers spent on average with a CIT call, against a program budget of approximately $460,000 annually.[3]
All outcome figures are program-reported by HPD and the Harris Center. No independent evaluation of the CCD program has been published.
The Coverage Gap
Houston’s CCD stops at 10 PM. From 10 PM to 6 AM, behavioral health calls that would otherwise qualify for CCD routing go to police. The overnight gap has persisted for more than a decade despite the program’s documented cost savings and operational success.
No public documentation explains why the overnight gap has not been addressed in a program now more than a decade old. The likely factor is the workforce economics of staffing licensed clinical positions for overnight shifts in a public sector salary structure that competes with hospitals and private practices. The Harris Center, operating under the multi-agency governance structure, cannot unilaterally expand to 24/7 without budget decisions and operational changes across all three partner agencies.
The overnight gap illustrates the structural funding problem Angela Kimball of Inseparable documented: encounter-based funding (billing for active calls) cannot cover the overhead of clinical readiness during low-call hours. A program funded per call resolved will not automatically generate revenue sufficient to pay clinicians to sit in a call center from 10 PM to 6 AM.[4]
Significance
Houston’s CCD matters in the documented landscape for two reasons.
First, longevity. Most well-documented dispatch integration programs launched between 2019 and 2024. Houston launched in 2015 and has been continuously operational for more than a decade, including through changes in HPD leadership, multiple budget cycles, and the organizational turbulence of the COVID-19 period. A program operating for ten-plus years with documented savings represents a different evidentiary category than a program in its first two years. It has survived the conditions that have ended shorter-lived programs.
Second, the independent sign-off design. CCD telecounselors close mental health crisis calls without police clearance. This is a structural choice — it means CCD is not a triage layer that hands back to police; it is an endpoint for eligible calls. Programs designed to require police clearance to close calls create a different operational dynamic: the police department retains a veto over how quickly calls are resolved, which can create friction and reduce the program’s independence. Houston built independence into the design in 2015, before most cities had articulated why that independence matters.
What Houston Has Not Published
Breakdown of call types handled by CCD
Updated outcome data since 2021 (most recent publicly available data covers 2016–2021)
Explanation of why 24/7 coverage has not been implemented despite a decade of documented savings
Individual caller outcome data — what happened to people after the call ended
Formal program evaluation by an independent research institution
Houston’s CCD represents one of the most consequential gaps in the documented landscape: a decade-old embedded dispatch program that has not published updated outcome data since 2021 and has not been independently evaluated. Its longevity and independent sign-off design make it a significant case study; its data silence limits what can be learned from it.
Sources
[1] Wayne Young, CEO, Harris Center for Mental Health and IDD: Harris Center for Mental Health and IDD CORE program documentation, cited in Dispatch-Embedding newsletter (Safer Cities).
[2] Houston CCD program documentation: Houston CIT, https://www.houstoncit.org/ccd/; CSG Justice Center, “911 Dispatch Diversion,” https://projects.csgjusticecenter.org/strategy-lab/entry/911-dispatch-diversion/
[3] Houston CCD program documentation: Houston CIT, https://www.houstoncit.org/ccd/; CSG Justice Center, “911 Dispatch Diversion,” https://projects.csgjusticecenter.org/strategy-lab/entry/911-dispatch-diversion/
[4] Angela Kimball / Inseparable capacity-vs-encounter funding: NPR, January 1, 2026, https://www.npr.org/2026/01/01/nx-s1-5652076/mobile-crisis-teams-shut-down-amid-funding-troubles