Mission Local39%
S.F. fire dept. quietly announced it will cut peer counselors from street crisis teams 3%
By Annelise Bowers20%
7/30/2026, 5:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 10 faulty reasoning types, including Hasty Generalization, Negativity Bias, and Halo Effect, with Anecdotal as the most egregious example at 6.5% saturation with 94 hits. Analysis detected 512 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,444 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 14% and a BS Rank of 3% (21,797 of 22,405 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 97.30% of the article peer group.
When Amelia Harmon arrived at the scene of the 911 call, an ambulance, several police cars and a mental health clinician were gathered around an apartment building, at a standstill.
At the top of the outside staircase, there was a woman holding a baseball bat, screaming and crying.
Around the stairs, police officers and EMTs stood at a safe distance, unable to approach because the woman was armed.
Harmon stepped forward, introduced herself to the woman, and began walking up, following de-escalating tactics and asking the woman what was wrong.
“She said, ‘If there’s anything I need, it’s a hug,’ ” Harmon said.
“I’m not sworn staff.
I am non-uniformed, and I can walk up there and hug her.
So I did.”
The woman dropped the bat and took the hug.
Harmon is not an EMT, a police officer, or a firefighter.
She does not wear a uniform.
She’s a peer counselor, a person familiar with mental-health or substance-abuse issues, and is trained specifically in de-escalation techniques.
As a member of the city’s Street Crisis Response Team, she works aboard a fire department ambulance, responding to emergency reports of people in mental health crises.
Now, Harmon’s role, and that of her colleagues, is quietly coming to an end.
On July 8, the handful of peer counselors that have worked with the San Francisco Fire Department to respond to mental health-related emergency calls since 2020 learned that the fire department has chosen to terminate their contract, effective Aug.
14.
While the city still employs some peer counselors, they will no longer be going out on 911 calls.
The mayor’s office declined to comment on the contract’s cancellation.
“We defer to SFFD, as it was an operational matter,” wrote spokesperson Shelby Weiss.
The cut is a mystery.
Their roles are subsidized by the city’s public health department, and funding for their roles appears to still be in place.
Also a mystery, said Harmon, is how SFFD plans to fill the unique role in emergency response that peer counselors have held.
The fire department has developed its own community paramedicine program, which trains paramedics to deal with individuals in mental health crises.
But the paramedics often don’t have the lived experience of a peer counselor, and the uniform can make people feel uncomfortable, peers say.
“Having that non-uniformed approach without the steel-toed boots really does help people feel more comfortable talking to us,” Harmon said.
“I can tell them about the time something happened to me.
And that’s a very different experience than someone coming in with a uniform.”
In her five years on the job, Harmon has helped people in crisis with tasks that are well beyond the scope of what a firefighter, EMT, paramedic or police officer employed by the city would normally do.
She’s on the scene and then helps people navigate the city's archipelago of mental health services and get connected to help.
“We respond to people in any type of situation, whether it’s a packed SRO and someone just needs a break from their psychotic roommate, or someone having a first episode of psychosis after they moved out of their parents’ house.”
The people Harmon encounters on emergency calls cover a wide range, she said, from the city’s wealthiest residents to its poorest.
Sometimes they’re a college student.
Sometimes they’re a new mother struggling with postpartum depression or mania.
Sometimes they’re a burnt-out caregiver.
Sometimes it’s a homeless person.
Some of the peer counselors who go out on emergency calls work with the city’s Homeless Outreach Team, which gives them access to the ONE System, an online database that serves as the central coordinating system for the city's mental health resources.
That access is critical, said one peer counselor, who asked not to be named, for helping people not fall through cracks in the system.
They described going out on a call in which, using the ONE system, they discovered that the person in crisis had secured a spot in a longer-term shelter.
Without that information, they said, the man likely would have been taken to a drop-in-shelter by the EMT and paramedic, and lost the shelter they already had.
Peer counselors can also use the ONE system to make shelter reservations on the spot.
It’s a process that takes skill and knowledge of the system, one counselor said, comparing the shelter bed system to “Hungry Hippos.”
“We’re just flying, typing it out on our phones,” they said.
“It’s like getting Taylor Swift tickets.
They [EMT and Paramedic] are never going to get Taylor Swift tickets.”
### From rumor to reality
In early June, a rumor began to go around that the fire department was considering terminating its contract with peer counselors.
Harmon went directly to fire leadership, who denied the rumors at first.
Then, after nearly a month of asking for updates in meetings with the fire department, Harmon’s organization, RAMS, received verbal confirmation from the fire department that their contract would be terminated.
“It was only through our very direct questioning from individuals that we found out,” Harmon said.
On July 8, EMS Deputy Chief Garreth Miller made a statement to the Fire Commission.
“As part of our evaluation of the community paramedicine program and focusing on its mission and really orienting to high-acuity calls — which we think our personnel are uniquely qualified to respond to — we have decided to discontinue the practice of deploying peer counselors on the apparatus,” Miller said.
Miller also said that it was inconvenient for EMS to pick up peer counselors at 555 Stevenson St. on their way to calls and that the peer counselors had “inconsistent” levels of training.
Peer counselors said that they have offered to be on site at fire stations, and that the issue of inconsistent training has not been brought up in previous meetings between the peer counseling teams and SFFD as a serious issue.
One peer counselor described the shock of their non-peer co-workers when they shared the news.
“Are you serious or just messing around,” one of them texted back.
“Holy fucking shit,” another co-worker responded.
Harmon appeared before the Health Commission on July 8 to make a public comment.
The commissioners appeared surprised by the news.
So did the commissioners on the Fire Commission and the Police Commission when she spoke to them a few days later.
After hearing her speak during the public comment period, the police commissioners called Harmon back to hear more about the change.
“They didn’t seem to know at all,” Harmon noted.
The peer counselors aren’t the first group to be removed from 911 calls.
In 2023, the passage of SB 43 gave police the ability to issue a psychiatric hold, and mental health clinicians who had previously been on the Street Crisis Response Team were laid off, leaving only the peer counselors to do mental health work.
Since the announcement was made official, said Harmon, she has reached out to community partners and city leaders to try and save the program, walking more than 23 miles in the process.
She developed a seven-point “collaborative framework” on how peer counselors could work more effectively with the fire department and sent it to the SFFD as well as the Mayor’s Office, and built out a website, with sample letters of complaint to local officials, along with a collection of studies on the effectiveness of peer counselors.
“Research, testimony, and common sense say the same thing: peers are often the only team member a person in crisis will trust enough to be honest with,” writes Harmon, on the site.
“We're asking the Fire Commission, Health Commission, Board of Supervisors, and the Mayor's Office to keep workers with lived experience on this 911-dispatched crisis response team — not as an afterthought, but as a core value of how we treat our community.”
At Tuesday's meeting of the Board of Supervisors, Harmon spoke out in support of the program during the public comment period.
The agenda for that day said that more than 35 of the letters had been submitted to the Board ahead of the meeting in favor of saving the program, signed by firefighters, EMTs, primary care providers, and an array of mental health program leaders.
“Removing the peers will create more frequent 911 use from our most vulnerable,” read one letter.
“This proposed removal will undermine the Mayor's Office.”
After the Board of Supervisors meeting, Harmon wasn’t sure if her efforts would be successful.
But, she said, that’s not the only thing that matters.
“Even if we don’t win this fight,” Harmon said.
“People deserve to know.”
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