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The city has removed Peer Counselors from the Street Crisis Response Team. We're asking decision-makers to put them back on the call.
Each one counts.
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No one wants to call 911. If you experience something that reaches this level of desperation, whether your family member is suicidal, you're having violent hallucinations and don't want to call a friend, you're watching someone have a terrible drug reaction that is beyond something you can help, you want someone who understands, someone who upholds the person's dignity, to show up. That's the job of a Peer Counselor.
Right now, in San Francisco, this is the clearest, most direct way we have to meet struggling people with care and connection. SCRT already lost its Behavioral Health Clinicians in 2023, even though national guidelines recommend master's-level clinicians on these teams. Now the Peer Counselors — the workers with the living experience of recovery in mental health, substance use, and homelessness — have been removed. That leaves only the fire department EMT and Paramedic. Research, testimony, and common sense say the same thing: peers are often the only team member a person in crisis will trust enough to be honest with.
This effort is led by concerned members of the public. We're asking the Fire Commission, Health Commission, Board of Supervisors, and the Mayor's Office to put workers with lived experience back on this 911-dispatched crisis response team — not as an afterthought, but as a core value of how we treat our community.
Paramedics, doctors, providers, shelter staff, researchers, parents, and concerned citizens wrote to the City about removing Peer Counselors from the Street Crisis Response Team. These are their words.
Every card above is a different person writing to the Board of Supervisors, the Fire Commission, the Health Commission, or the Mayor's Office. Names and identifying details have been removed. Fifty-five of the letters are excerpted here, none repeated. Full letters are retrievable through a public records request via board.of.supervisors@sfgov.org.
These letters were submitted in an organizational capacity and are reproduced in full. Open one to turn the pages, or switch to Readable text to select, search, copy, and zoom the letter itself.
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