> we are proposing to send ill-equipped people to a potential life or death situation nobody is able to predict.

But no one is proposing that at all. The proposal is to send well-trained but unarmed people to these situations. You are the one who is claiming that by not having lethal weapons, they will be ill-equipped. This is an opinion that is generally not borne out by the data -- in the general case, guns don't make situations safer, they make them even more dangerous. The idea that the best and only way to handle every potentially dangerous situation is by involving lethal weapons is one that seems uniquely American. Most other countries in the world have drastically fewer guns, and drastically stricter restrictions on their use, both in the general population as well as in law enforcement, and have fewer rather than more gun deaths. For example, another comment in this thread mentions that in England, officers carry only non-lethal devices, and call in a SWAT equivalent in the rare cases where one is needed.

And all of this is ignoring the reason that this pilot is being run in the first place -- that we know that there is a huge problem in the United States with police officers shooting and killing people who were in fact not trying to kill them. By concentrating entirely on the potential safety of police officers, you are discounting the value of the lives of those who are killed by these officers because the officers are not, and probably cannot be (in the same way that police officers cannot generally be trained as EMTs), properly trained to handle acute but non-dangerous cases of mental illness. This pilot is a data-backed attempt to fight against the idea that it's always better to go in guns-blazing just on the off chance that someone may be actively trying to harm you, because that approach leads to a large amount of totally unnecessary civilian deaths. I'm also certain the well-trained unit of mental health first-responders understand the risks that they'd be taking, just like police officers do.

> you better be willing to go out and take those calls before you send someone else out to do it. That, to me, is honorable. Anything else is fake virtue signaling while playing with someone else's life.

> think a leader must include this as one of his or her guiding principles: I will never ask you to do something I am not willing to do myself (or have not done myself)

I'm genuinely curious how you imagine this "honorable" approach playing out in reality. Obviously, it's not possible for everyone to have done everything, so in the general case, we're talking about being "willing" to do something, rather than actually having done it (unless you would have ex-police officers legislate all laws related to the police, ex-firefighters legislate everything related to firefighting, ex-bartenders legislate anything related to bars, etc, which I hope you recognize is more than a little ridiculous given the variety of human experience and thus the size of the legislative body that would be required to follow this approach). Right now, you're applying this principle to responding to 911 calls. Would you then also require that everyone involved in any police-related legislation be appropriately trained to actually go and respond to these calls (as police officers are, and as the mental health responders would be)? Given police-related legislation is only one of many legislative topics, would you apply that same principle to legislation involving EMTs and firefighters -- only those who go through training to physically fight fires themselves or go out on ambulances should be able to propose and enact laws related to these activities? How could one possibly have the time to appropriately train in all potential professions? As for a more loose definition of "willing", I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a politician who would publicly say they weren't willing to (e.g.) fight fires, but I'm sure that's not what you actually mean.

I think this is a fallacy. You can think about, discuss, research, study, and enact programs, rules, and regulations about a certain area even without having first-hand experience in that area -- that is a basic principle of human society. You should certainly inform yourself (through aforementioned research and studies) of the knowledge that rests with those who do have first-hand experience, but given that we know that systemic issues and bias exist in pretty much any field, and that those who are closest to that field are most likely to be influenced by both these and personal anecdotal "evidence", I would steer clear from basing your decisions entirely on their opinions, rather than taking these opinions as part of a more holistic view.