The Office of Emergency Management and Communication (OEMC) has completed mental health awareness and de-escalation training for all of its 911 Police Operations call takers and dispatchers, and Chicago Police Department (CPD) has appointed new leadership, Lieutenant Antoinette Ursitti, to lead the Crisis Response Unit. A primary goal of the City’s mental health emergency response reforms is ensuring the safest possible conclusion to a mental health related incident. The first step in the process is correctly identifying 911 calls that warrant a crisis-intervention trained (CIT) officer response. The training curriculum used for OEMC call takers and dispatchers, developed by OEMC in collaboration with CPD and the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) Chicago, is an important step forward in improving the City’s overall mental health response system. In an effort to better inform the training and curriculum, all 911 training staff members and 911 supervisors completed CPD’s 40-hour CIT course prior to developing the new module specifically for telecommunicators. This training includes: an overview of CPD’s CIT programming, group activities to review example calls needing CIT response, methods to communicate with callers experiencing a mental health crisis to better de-escalate the situation for both the caller and first responders arriving the scene, role playing scenarios to simulate CIT calls, and a review of CPD and OEMC’s policies regarding mental health related responses.