A story in the New York Daily News highlights one of the many challenges for law enforcement in handling mental health issues in the community: although the NYPD has more than 4,000 specially trained cops to deescalate incidents involving the mentally ill, but they’ve been woefully ineffective in getting the officers to critical scenes. According to the report by NYPD Inspector General Philip Eure, dispatch hers don’t know were members of the Crisis Intervention Team, or CIT, are when they field 911 calls related to a “mental crisis.”

“911 dispatchers cannot assign CIT-trained officers to crisis calls because they have no way of determining which patrol cars in the field contain CIT-trained officers,” the report found. “This is highly problematic.”

The NYPD gets more than 400 per day  regarding people who are emotionally disturbed.