Police departments across northern Illinois are now the default responders to mental health crises — a role they were never trained for and a system government promised but never delivered.
For decades, policymakers sold the public on "community-based" mental health care as they emptied institutions. What working communities got instead was neither treatment nor safety: just a badge and a gun showing up to a breakdown that requires neither.
The numbers are stark. Nearly one in every 10 calls handled by the Joliet Police Department involves some aspect of mental health, according to Sgt. Dwayne English. In 2025, Joliet officers responded to over 500 calls directly related to suicide or suicidal ideation. In Dixon, police handled 168 mental health calls last year — including 62 suicides — up from 101 in 2023 and 98 in 2022, Shaw Local reported. Ottawa police Capt. Kyle Booras said his department gets mental health calls "if not daily, every other day."
OSF HealthCare, the primary medical provider for Dixon, Ottawa, and Peru residents, sees over 80,000 mental health patients annually in its emergency rooms. That number has climbed significantly over five years. About 23% of those ER patients arrive by ambulance — meaning first responders are the front line of a system that was supposed to have treatment beds and outpatient care, not patrol cars.
Peru Police Chief Sarah Raymond didn't mince words: every call is "highly unpredictable" and "very dangerous for officers." Booras noted that many of these incidents also involve drugs or alcohol, making standard de-escalation techniques ineffective. "It's difficult to try to reason with someone who's under the influence," he said.
And here's the rub that the reformers never want to admit: you can't force people to accept help. "We have resources for people in crisis in our area, but you can't make people go to them," Raymond said. "Oftentimes, individuals in crisis have an aversion to help."
Since 2022, Illinois has required all law enforcement officers to complete annual crisis intervention training. Training is fine. But training cops to be social workers doesn't build the mental health infrastructure that was promised when the state shuttered its institutions. It just shifts the burden onto people with badges and working-class communities that bear the cost of every failed promise.
The crisis is deepening from other directions, too. A University of Virginia study by economist Emma Harrington found that remote work is quietly eroding mental health for isolated Americans — particularly those living alone in remote-capable jobs, who report no meaningful human contact on one in four days. That isolation feeds the same crisis pipeline that ends with a 911 call and a patrol car.
The institutions were closed. The community centers were never built. The working people who pay the price get neither safety nor care — just another government promise that evaporated on contact with reality.
