EDP stands for “emotionally disturbed person,” a term used by police and emergency dispatchers to classify someone who appears to be experiencing a mental health crisis. It is not a medical diagnosis. It’s a label that triggers a specific set of emergency response procedures when a 911 call comes in. The term originated in law enforcement and remains most closely associated with large urban police departments, particularly the NYPD.
A Dispatch Label, Not a Diagnosis
When a 911 operator categorizes a call as involving an EDP, they’re flagging that the situation likely involves someone in psychological distress rather than someone committing a traditional crime. The label covers a wide range of scenarios: a person threatening self-harm, someone behaving erratically in public, a family member calling because a loved one with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder is in crisis. Roughly 7% of all calls to police involve people experiencing behavioral health emergencies.
The EDP classification carries no clinical weight. A dispatcher or officer isn’t diagnosing anyone. They’re making a quick judgment based on what a caller describes or what they observe on scene. The person might have a serious mental illness, might be having a panic attack, might be intoxicated, or might be going through an acute emotional breakdown with no underlying condition at all. The point of the label is operational: it tells responding officers and paramedics to expect a mental health situation and follow a different playbook than they would for a robbery or domestic dispute.
What Happens When Police Respond to an EDP Call
The NYPD’s patrol guide lays out detailed rules for these encounters, and most large departments follow similar principles. The first step is assessment: officers determine whether the person poses an immediate threat of serious physical injury to themselves or anyone else. That judgment shapes everything that follows.
If the person is unarmed, not violent, and willing to go voluntarily, an officer can take them into custody and arrange transport to a hospital without waiting for a supervisor. In every other situation, officers are instructed to isolate and contain the person while maintaining what’s called a “zone of safety,” a recommended minimum distance of 20 feet. They wait for a supervisor and a specialized emergency services unit to arrive. The guiding principle is time: when there’s room to negotiate, officers are told to use all the time necessary to keep everyone safe.
If the person is armed with something other than a firearm, officers establish firearms control, meaning they’re explicitly directed not to use deadly force unless someone’s life is in imminent danger. Departments may also bring in negotiators, interpreters, family members, clergy, or mental health professionals to help resolve the situation. Deadly physical force is designated as a last resort.
The Legal Basis for Involuntary Detention
Officers can’t detain someone simply for acting strangely. In New York, state law allows a police officer to take a person into custody only when that person “appears to be mentally ill and is conducting themself in a manner which is likely to result in serious harm to the person or others.” That’s the legal threshold, and it applies across most states in some form. The standard isn’t discomfort or disruption. It’s serious harm.
When someone meets that threshold, officers are directed to request transport by emergency medical services rather than placing the person in a patrol car, provided EMS is available and the person’s medical needs make that practical. The destination is typically a hospital emergency department for psychiatric evaluation. In cases involving a court-ordered involuntary commitment, officers are generally the ones responsible for ensuring the person gets to the ED.
Crisis Intervention Teams and Co-Response Models
Traditional EDP responses put patrol officers, who have limited mental health training, in charge of situations that are fundamentally about psychiatric crisis. The mismatch has driven two major reforms over the past few decades.
The first is the Crisis Intervention Team model, created by the Memphis Police Department in 1988. CIT gives select officers 40 hours of specialized training led by police trainers, mental health professionals, family advocates, and people with lived experience of mental illness. After training, these officers become the designated first responders for mental health calls. Studies show CIT-trained officers score significantly better on de-escalation skills, knowledge of mental illness, and decisions about when to refer someone to treatment rather than jail. The improvements in de-escalation and referral decisions are particularly strong.
The second reform is the co-response model, which pairs a police officer with a behavioral health professional. Once the officer determines a scene is safe, the mental health clinician takes the lead on de-escalation, assessment, and figuring out whether the person needs hospitalization, a referral to outpatient services, or simply someone to talk them through a crisis. The goal is to reduce unnecessary emergency room visits and keep people out of the criminal justice system when what they actually need is care.
How Common These Calls Are
New York City provides one of the clearest windows into the scale of mental health emergency calls. Between fiscal years 2022 and 2024, the city received over 96,000 mental health-related 911 calls in areas covered by its newer crisis response program, B-HEARD. Of those, about 37,000 were deemed eligible for a health-centered response rather than a police-only one, and roughly 24,000 actually received it. The program’s reach has grown quickly: in fiscal year 2022, 57% of eligible calls got a mental health team response. By fiscal year 2024, that number climbed to 73%.
Still, gaps remain. Over 14,000 eligible calls between January 2022 and September 2024 received a traditional police-only response simply because the mental health teams didn’t operate overnight. Those callers got officers instead of clinicians, not because their situation called for it, but because of scheduling.
Why the Term Matters
The phrase “emotionally disturbed person” has drawn criticism for being vague and stigmatizing. It flattens a huge range of experiences into a single bureaucratic category. Someone having a psychotic episode, someone contemplating suicide, and someone in the grip of a severe panic attack all get the same three-letter label on a dispatcher’s screen. That label then shapes which resources show up at their door.
The shift toward co-response teams and dedicated mental health crisis lines reflects a broader recognition that “EDP” was always a workaround. Police became the default responders to psychiatric emergencies not because they were best suited for it, but because no other system existed to fill the gap. The term persists in dispatch codes and patrol guides, but the response it triggers is slowly changing from a law enforcement problem to a public health one.