Brief Reports taining mental health services to lead to a reduced tendency of persons from racial or ethnic minority groups to seek help for psychiatric crises through the 911 system. Calls to the 911 system regarding mental health–related crises generally originate in the physical location where the crises occur, so attitudes in those places toward public health and safety authorities, as well as toward mental illness, could affect the rate of mental health–related 911 calls. From this it follows that neighborhoods with higher proportions of residents from racial or ethnic minority groups would be expected to have a lower frequency of calls related to mental health crises than neighborhoods with a lower proportion of residents from racial or ethnic minority groups. Fewer 911 calls would then keep persons with severe mental illness at risk of harming themselves or others and delay needed mental health treatment during psychiatric crises.

This study investigated the hypothesis that the rate of mental health–related 911 calls is negatively associated with a higher percentage of residents from racial or ethnic minority groups, after controls for other sources of differences in propensity to call 911, such as crime (11), neighborhood socioeconomic status, and demographic composition. We tested this hypothesis using existing 911 call data and census 2000 data from San Francisco, a racially heterogeneous city with a population in 2005 of approximately 739,000, of which about 33.0% are Asian or Pacific Islander, 7.3% are black, and 14.0% are Latino (12).