In early 2026, Alameda County, California, counted 8,201 people living without stable housing in its annual Point-in-Time Count. For those on the waitlist for emergency housing, getting a bed starts a clock. Once one opens, a person usually has about 72 hours to claim it before the county offers it to the next name on the list. For someone who is unhoused, that can be an impossible window to meet. They may not have a working phone or a fixed address. Reaching them at all can take longer than the county has.
To qualify for a shelter bed, a person has to be, in the county’s term, “document-ready,” with a government-issued ID, a Social Security card, and proof of income already on file. “If they aren’t document-ready, they’ll get passed up for housing,” said Jaime Dadej, a service coordinator with the Hayward Evaluation and Response Teams, known as HEART. “Their name won’t even come up on the list if they don’t have certain documents on file.”
Keeping people from falling through those gaps is HEART’s job. Increasingly, the team is leveraging Peregrine Technologies to do it.
The teams behind the acronym
HEART sits inside the Hayward Police Department, and it runs on two teams. One, the Hayward Mobile Evaluation Team, answers mental health crisis calls with a behavioral health clinician and a specially trained officer responding together. The other, the Mental Health and Case Management Linkages Team, or LINK, connects residents facing behavioral health crises, substance use disorders, and homelessness to services such as emergency housing.
Because HEART is part of the police department, its staff are authorized to see certain police records that help them work safely with people in crisis. But until recently, that information lived in separate systems that did not talk to each other, and much of it could not be reached from the field at all.
Finding someone before the bed is gone
When a housing provider or case manager loses track of a client who has a bed waiting, they call LINK. The search falls to Dadej and her colleagues. Their task is to locate the person, make contact, and get them to the shelter before the window closes.
LINK uses the Peregrine Technologies platform to streamline the process. A coordinator can search a client’s name and see the associated dispatch incidents, addresses, and known contacts that hint at where the person might be. Much of that information lives in the department’s computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system, but Dadej’s team cannot always reach it. “It’s not mobile on my phone,” she said. “And even if I’m sitting at a desktop, not all desktops in our department have the right systems. So if I can’t get into the CAD platform, I can’t see anything. Peregrine’s mobile app has changed that completely.”
The same records help her when she has never met the person she is looking for. When she looks a client up, the platform surfaces people connected to them, including family, and Dadej said she has used that information to reconnect estranged relatives. “I can look them up, I can see their past reports, I can see if there are any family members or addresses listed that are in Hayward, and we can start there to see if we can help rebuild some relationships,” she said.
Access built for this kind of data
Peregrine Technologies takes the fragmented information an organization already has and turns it into one clear view, the kind that helps teams make decisions and move quickly. The platform maps an organization’s records to its people, cases, and roles, so the right, contextually relevant information reaches the right person at the right time.
The information HEART works with is exactly the kind that has to be handled carefully: criminal justice records and health-related data about vulnerable people, much of it regulated. Rather than gathering more of it, Peregrine governs how the department’s existing records are reached. The company does not collect, create, or sell data. It enforces the permissions an organization already has, defaults to least-privilege access, and lets administrators set role- and attribute-based access rules, monitor usage in real time, and review activity logs. Compliance frameworks such as CJIS and HIPAA are built into the foundation rather than bolted on.
The result is narrow by design. HEART sees only what HEART is already authorized to see, now reachable from a phone in the field rather than only from a desk–or not at all.
Building the case for care
Some of HEART’s work runs through the courts. California’s CARE Act lets first responders, clinicians, and family members petition a civil court to order treatment and housing for people with a schizophrenia spectrum or other psychotic disorder who are not in care. Building one of those petitions means assembling a person’s history: prior calls for service, arrests, and involuntary psychiatric holds that used to be scattered across systems.
Dadej now pulls that together in one place, often through a verifiable summary the platform generates automatically. “I can look up the person in Peregrine and get this AI summary that says the person has a pattern of violating restraining orders, and in 2025 they violated restraining orders 160 times,” she said. “I can put that word-for-word in the CARE Act petition, and I don’t have to look up each call for service individually.” The AI summary is designed to augment human judgement, not replace it, and in so doing points back to the underlying records cited in every response. The petition is still hers to write and file.
Outreach that heads off arrests
The people Dadej looks for often turn up in more than one system at once. A study by the California Policy Lab and UCSF’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, which linked a decade of San Francisco records, found that a small group of people cycle repeatedly through both jail and the emergency room: those with at least three jail bookings and seven or more urgent medical visits in a single year. By the end of the study’s ten-year window, more than a quarter of one such group had died.
Dadej uses Peregrine to aim outreach at the places that need it most. “I’m able to see people who get arrested time and time again, what they’re arrested for, and where they get arrested, and that helps us determine where we need to do more outreach,” she said.
The goal is to reach people before the next arrest rather than after it. When she finds someone who keeps cycling through, she can check whether they are document-ready for housing and, if not, send providers to help them gather what they are missing. “If I see that someone keeps getting arrested in the same area, I can have providers go there and offer to do coordinated entry assessments and bring services to them to hopefully divert arrests in the future,” Dadej said. “When folks’ unmet needs finally get addressed, they may be less likely to end up in the circumstances that keep leading to arrest.”
“For our repeat offenders, and especially transient folks, I’d like to get them plugged into a social service system and unplugged from the criminal justice system,” she continued. “I know it’s just a dream. A lot of these folks don’t accept services. But a lot of them do. And the ones who do accept services, sometimes we can plug them in, and then we don’t see them again. And that’s good.”
This content is provided for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional advice. AFP editorial staff were not involved in the creation of this content.
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