In July it was Steven Guillory.

In January it was Omar Esparza.

Last month it was Reginald Sumbler.

They are three people who friends and neighbors say were either mentally unbalanced, or just not themselves when someone called police.

All of them were shot and killed when something went wrong and officers say they feared for their lives.

About 400 Houston Police Officers have 40 hours of training in “crisis intervention,” but Houston City Council member Adrian Garcia says in some cases, even specially-trained police aren’t the answer. “They’re still not mental health professionals. They get great training to deal with some of these circumstances but all that training does not, and can not replace the academic and clinical experiences that our mental health professionals have.”

So Garcia is proposing a change in what happens when a 911 call first comes in.

Right now, dispatchers generally route emergencies to three basic categories.

They are police, fire and ambulance.

Garcia wants to add mental health counselors as the fourth category.

If a suspect doesn’t have a weapon, Garcia says, a counselor would respond. Not an officer. “To do that, dispatchers ask more questions about a person’s mental state. That doesn’t always happen now.”

“No I don’t think that in all cases we know exactly what we’re faced with as I said we generally don’t determine a lot of that information until we get to the scene,” said Sgt. Nate McDuell with HPD.

The idea is to get more information before a crisis begins.