Skokie 911 dispatchers can now route some mental health calls to 988 crisis line

Skokie residents who call 911 for certain mental-health or substance-use issues could now see a team of behavioral health specialists arrive on scene instead of police. The change is part of the rollout of a state law that enables Skokie dispatchers, starting Aug. 1, to transfer calls directly to the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline to provide an additional resource to callers “that do not present an immediate life-safety threat,” a village webpage shows. 

When residents call 911, Skokie dispatchers “will continue to assess each call carefully” and send police, fire or emergency services personnel to any call “involving an immediate threat to life or safety, such as a weapon, crime, or serious medical emergency,” a village webpage states. 

But local dispatchers may now transfer calls to the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, a separate agency that will coordinate with Trilogy, a Chicago-based nonprofit that can send a mobile crisis response team consisting of a behavioral health clinician and peer specialist into the field. 

On scene, that team will then work with the person in-need of help to deescalate the situation, determine if more services are needed and create a safety plan based on how that person’s needs may best be supported, Jen McGowan-Tomke, Trilogy’s vice president, said. 

“Most people still know to call 911 in an emergency,” McGowan-Tomke said. “There’s growing awareness about 988 as a resource, but folks don’t really understand what’s underneath that and the majority of mental health emergency calls still go to the 911 system, across the country, or at least in Illinois.” 

“So in order to make that structural change, we need our system to be able to assess calls into 911 to determine whether the best response is actually a behavioral health response, and then move that caller to the behavioral health system without the caller needing to do something different.”

Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed the Illinois Community Emergency Services and Supports Act into law in 2021, a law named after Stephen Watts, a 15-year-old teen with autism who Calumet City police shot in 2012 after his family called 911, a state webpage says.

The legislation apparently requires the state’s 176 emergency call centers coordinate with its 68 different designated mobile response team programs to provide a “community-based” response to “low-level and low-risk behavioral health crises” across the state by July 2027. 

Police Chief Jesse Barnes said the Skokie Police Department’s emergency dispatchers all obtained additional training and updates to their computer dispatch systems prior to the village becoming part of the second cohort of state agencies to officially come into compliance with the state law. 

Barnes said he would like to see residents call 988 directly to obtain early intervention to behavioral health issues because, when someone calls 911 in crisis, information is not always available for dispatchers to know whether the call fits the parameters to be transferred to 988. 

In that case, Skokie police may still respond to calls concerning behavioral health issues with officers to “err on the side of caution” and make sure there’s no risk of harm, Barnes said.

The police chief noted that 70 out of the police department’s 107 sworn officers are already certified in crisis intervention training and all future hires will have that training. 

The department also employs a co-responder team from around 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. that consists of a plain-clothes officer and village social worker focused on de-escalating situations, following up with individuals from past calls for service and coordinating with other local organizations. 

Barnes said he anticipates Skokie police will transfer some calls to 988, just as some calls will still be sent directly to the co-responder team or patrol officers depending on the individual circumstances.

In that way, the police chief sees the formal link of 988 to Skokie’s dispatch system as bringing a “blended approach” to the village police department’s response to calls for service. 

“I think this program is going to help the community, but it’s really going to help the community more if people take advantage of it, you know, before they get to that really bad day,” Barnes said. 

McGowan-Tomke said Trilogy has been serving the north side of Chicago with mental health services for 50 years, but started serving Skokie more recently after receiving a government contract. A webpage from the nonprofit shows it expanded to Skokie in 2022. 

That means, before this change went into effect, Skokie residents could have already dialed 988 and been referred to Trilogy, or called the nonprofit directly to potentially see a response from one of its mobile response teams, McGowan-Tomke said. 

But the formal link between 911 and 988 in Skokie now means that residents may gain access to the resources Trilogy can provide even if they were not explicitly aware of the nonprofit’s role in the community.

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