Last July, the killing of Sonya Massey by a police officer downstate placed police responses to mental health calls in Illinois in the national spotlight. Though it took place nearly 200 miles away, the shooting echoed loudly in Chicago, where officers respond to more than 150 mental health-related calls every day.

These calls range from mundane complaints about loitering to those that elicit a SWAT response. Some end in arrest. Sometimes the caller agrees to go to a medical facility. But our investigation shows that officers are increasingly strapping residents to gurneys and forcing them into ambulances, then hospitals. Experts we interviewed say it has become the “default” response.

Though it’s hard to find reliable data, it’s not just happening in Chicago. And with the mounting mental health crisis and an executive order from the White House to force unhoused people into “long-term institutional settings,” it’s bound to become a more common approach.

For the last two years, the teams at the Invisible Institute and MindSite News dug into data from the Chicago Police Department to find out just how often the police are hospitalizing Chicago residents — more than six a day last year. We also wanted to know how these often violent interactions play out in the real world. Are the people who get hospitalized helped? And what happens once the police leave? Too often, it can be a trauma that continues to haunt people and undermine their mental health.

For this series, we wanted to look at the whole mental health landscape in Chicago. We enrolled student journalists from Medill Investigative Lab-Chicago, who spent six months diving into the CARE unit, the city’s alternative crisis response team that police were removed from last year. They also looked into what happens when police respond with force to a growing number of those mental health calls per day. And they explored Crisis Intervention Team training, a widely-used effort designed to help police better recognize and respond to people experiencing a mental health crisis.

Hopefully, this package can serve not only to document growing problems, but as a springboard for thinking through solutions—starting right here.