BALTIMORE — Baltimore officials say they’ve boosted the number of 911 calls diverted to mental health professionals, but acknowledge that long wait times and continued police involvement show the city’s crisis response system remains a work in progress.

An investigation by The Baltimore Sun in July 2025 found a sharp drop in emergency calls being transferred from 911 to behavioral health experts, even as police confronted a string of fatal encounters involving people in crisis. The data now shows that in the months that followed, city agencies and lawmakers overhauled parts of the system, leading to a more than 50% increase in diversions in the second half of the year.

The Sun investigation was prompted by multiple police-involved deaths of people who were experiencing mental health crises, and subsequently influenced calls for oversight to determine where the disconnect began, culminating in a series of City Council hearings to examine the system and discuss strategies to improve it.

“There should be no such situation where a resident of the City of Baltimore who is in a crisis should have to wait an hour to an hour and a half to have someone come out,” said City Council President Zeke Cohen. “Far too often are police asked to do mental health work when they should really be focused on solving crime.”

Finding the disconnect

Baltimore’s crisis response network is overseen by Behavioral Health System Baltimore, or BHSB, which manages the region’s 988 helpline. The line fields more than 4,000 calls a month, connecting residents experiencing suicidal thoughts, acute stress and other behavioral health emergencies to counselors or mobile crisis teams.

The system was also designed to cooperate with the city’s 911 dispatch system, with 911 emergency dispatchers being trained to patch calls concerning behavioral crises to the 988 operators and be handled by mental health professionals.

“Our goal is to prevent people from going to the emergency department and prevent the use of law enforcement when people are having a behavioral health crisis,” BHSB spokesperson Adrienne Breidenstine said, but the number of calls being transferred dramatically declined in 2022, leading to many behavioral health crisis calls going straight to police.

As part of the city’s federal consent decree, the Baltimore Police Department is required to train its officers in mental health crisis intervention. This includes 24 hours of training for every officer at the police academy and an additional eight hours each year, as well as an optional weeklong crisis intervention certification course.

BPD spokesperson Lindsey Eldridge said the department is working to “increase Crisis Intervention Training and ensure individuals are connected to the most appropriate care and resources available.”

In January, BPD revealed that about 28% of its officers were certified in crisis intervention — just shy of the department’s original goal of 30%, as mandated by the city’s consent decree.

According to a report from the Maryland Attorney General’s Independent Investigations Division, which investigates police-involved fatalities across the state, nearly 1 in 4 people killed by police in Maryland were experiencing mental health crises.

These included the fatal police shooting of 70-year-old Pytorcarcha Brooks and the death of Dontae Melton Jr. in the custody of Baltimore police, both in June 2025.

BPD worked with its agency and organizational partners, including BHSB, to conduct analyses called “Sentinel Event Reviews” of those incidents, which are also required by the city’s consent decree when behavioral health crises result in “serious injuries or other adverse outcomes” after police officers become involved.

Breidenstine said the sentinel reviews of the incidents illustrated “potential breakdowns,” an aspect the city’s emergency response system has been working to address. She was not able to elaborate on their specific findings.

“When these types of tragedies happen, there can be a silver lining,” said Breidenstine. “It’s drawn attention to the city’s overall emergency response.”

Changes being made

In July, oversight of the behavioral health collaborative work shifted from the city’s health department to the Mayor’s Office of Overdose Response (BCMOOR). The office penned a grant agreement the same month with BHSB for $10 million to fund the organization’s work through the 2030 fiscal year.

“We have been working to improve the ability of the 911 call-takers to identify opportunities for diversions, and our efforts are paying off,” said Jonas Poggi, a spokesperson for Mayor Brandon Scott’s office.

Poggi pointed at the increased number of 911 diversions to 988, as well as incidents in which behavioral health workers are able to respond to situations with the assistance of other emergency responders, adding that the office has invested its attention and resources into strengthening the city’s crisis response system.

Data on the BHSB website shows that more than 80% of its calls are resolved over the phone, with most of the rest being handled by mobile crisis response units. The units are equipped with licensed clinicians and peers who go out to handle low-risk situations, able to resolve most requests without an emergency room visit or involvement of other first responders.

Work to be done

But response teams are often unable to arrive on scene for over an hour, with the BHSB dashboard showing the average mobile crisis response time is more than 83 minutes.

“We’ve had a number of situations where residents have been either left hanging for an inordinate amount of time,” said Cohen, “or have had the wrong responder arrive.”

He said that he agreed with recommendations set forth by BHSB at a City Council hearing in January, which would have Baltimore implement a civilian emergency response system with “broad knowledge and understanding of an array of services in Baltimore.”

Several other cities in the nation have implemented similar systems, including Durham, North Carolina, whose chief of police, Patrice Andrews, touted the city’s success at the January council hearing.

Durham’s civilian law enforcement team began in 2022 with 13 full-time employees; that number has expanded to 50. The team dispatches unarmed responders to nonviolent behavioral health and quality-of-life calls, operating alongside police, fire, and EMS.

Andrews said that the team has enabled to better apportion efforts of Durham emergency responders, who now average a response time of just over six minutes for crisis intervention responses.

“To me, that system makes a lot of sense,” remarked Cohen, who told The Sun that he and members of Scott’s staff will be traveling to Durham later this month to see the city’s system in action and take notes to bring back home to Baltimore.

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