Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott and City Council President Zeke Cohen announced on September 14 their answer to the deadly gaps in Baltimore’s behavioral health crisis response system: a third branch of the city’s public safety infrastructure, known as the Department of Neighborhood Safety, that will dispatch “alternative responders” for nonviolent emergency calls.
Much like the police and fire departments dispatches emergency responders, the Department of Neighborhood Safety would rapidly send out social workers and peer specialists, who use their personal experiences to guide others facing similar challenges, to respond to calls for wellness checks, public nuisances, and loitering. Baltimore’s 911 system receives more than 20,000 of these calls annually, including a third that involve people experiencing homelessness.
The flaws in Baltimore’s crisis response system became painfully clear over the course of just eight days last summer, when three city residents suffering from mental health emergencies died in encounters with the police.
The flaws in Baltimore’s crisis response system became painfully clear over the course of just eight days last summer, when three city residents suffering from mental health emergencies died in encounters with the police.
Bilal “BJ” Abdullah, a beloved arabber who was known to have mental health challenges, died in an exchange of gunfire with police on the evening of June 17, 2025, prompting a massive community response and march in his honor.
Dontae Melton Jr. walked up to a police car while experiencing a severe mental health crisis to ask for help on June 24, 2025. Officer Gerard Pettiford Jr. at first told Melton to “get off [his] car,” dismissed Melton’s urgent pleas for help, and restrained him. When medics failed to arrive because the city’s computer-aided dispatch system was down, a group of police officers stood around debating what to do and worried about the “optics” of dropping off an unconscious man at the hospital before finally taking Melton to Grace Medical Center, where he died alone as a John Doe after officers failed to record his name.
The next day, police fatally shot Pytorcarcha Brooks, a 70-year-old woman who barricaded herself in her home with a knife amid a long-simmering mental health crisis — police had received about 20 calls for behavioral health issues at Brooks’ house in the preceding six months. Officers who responded to the scene decided the best approach was to break down two doors and confront her. One of the officers tripped, falling to the ground inside the house, and another fatally shot Brooks when she slashed her knife at the fallen officer. (The Baltimore Police Department’s sole Crisis Response Team, which pairs officers with mental health clinicians, was busy responding to another call when police shot Brooks.)
The community responded with anguish and outrage. How could a police department with a $600 million budget be so incapable of responding to mental health emergencies with restraint and respect for human life? But at a City Council hearing on the issue, Police Commissioner Richard Worley faced almost no questions while most of the harshest criticism was reserved for far-less-funded crisis response providers.
“We cannot keep allowing our citizens, our seniors, to those with mental health issues, to keep being murdered,” Brooks’ brother, Bishop Jaron Spriggs, said at the hearing.
Cohen said in an interview with Baltimore Beat shortly after the announcement that the deaths last summer “crystallized” his belief in the need for the city’s own internal response system for mental health emergencies.
“When it comes to folks struggling with mental health crises, the city should have our own internal ability to respond and respond effectively,” Cohen said. “If someone is committing an act of violence, we send out a police officer. We should have that same level of rigor and urgency around a mental health crisis.”
It will take some time to get the new department up and running. City Council must first pass legislation to create the DNS, which will absorb the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement; then there will be a nationwide search for an executive and deputy director. It will also take time to build up enough clinical staff to serve the community with rapid responses 24/7, Cohen said. Clinician shortages mean the city will need to think creatively, and officials have already begun having conversations with local universities and schools of social work to see if it’s possible to build a pipeline to alternative response, Cohen said.
Cohen said he was convinced of the need for an alternative response system housed within the city’s public safety infrastructure after observing the crisis response system in Durham, North Carolina. He watched an alternative response team handle a call involving a man who was refusing to leave a Krispy Kreme store. They resolved the call without handcuffs, violence, or the added taxpayer cost of putting the man in jail and taking a trespassing case through the courts.
Mariela Ruiz-Angel, the director of alternative response initiatives at Georgetown Law’s Center for Innovations in Community Safety, told the Beat a year ago that national data shows that behavioral health responders can do this work without getting hurt.
“Less than 1% to 2% of calls actually need backup from a police officer,” Ruiz-Angel said. “If anything, we’re seeing more officers requesting these alternatives to go to them.”
Nonpolice responses also result in more voluntary transports because trained responders can sit and spend time with a person experiencing a mental health crisis to convince them to get help. These responders don’t handcuff people, Ruiz-Angel said, because that is seen as an escalation.
The new DNS will centralize the existing crisis response network, which uses a mix of city services and nonprofits. As it stands now, calls go to the 911 dispatch center, which is run by the city’s fire department, and can be diverted to the 988 helpline for assistance from Baltimore Crisis Response Inc. But the vast majority of behavioral health calls never get diverted to 988, and response times from mobile crisis teams can stretch to more than an hour and a half.
988 will continue to offer backup to the city’s alternative responders under the new program, said Adrienne Breidenstine, the vice president for policy and communications at Behavioral Health System Baltimore. The helpline will still be able to offer referrals to services and deploy mobile crisis teams to work in the community.
BHSB has been advocating for a more formal alternative response program for a long time, Breidenstine said, as have community members.
“They have long been saying we don’t want a police officer, lights and sirens, and somebody with a weapon showing up when it’s some kind of emotional health crisis or just a wellness check,” she said. “I think it shows the city is really listening to what the public wants.”
But even under the new system, there will still be times when police officers have to respond to mental health emergencies, such as when weapons are involved.
“When you have folks with mental health [concerns] and they are armed, there is still a gap in how we are able to serve that in those situations,” said Jamal Turner, the chair of Baltimore’s Police Accountability Board. The PAB has called for the Baltimore Police Department to hire social workers and mental health professionals who can respond even in situations where there is a weapon involved.
In April, the Citizens Policing Project, which helps community members get involved in police reform efforts, released a formal assessment of BPD’s 2026 Use of Force policy and concluded that the lack of nonpolice options in behavioral health emergencies poses a “critical risk” to the community
Instead of working toward a public safety system where mental health crises are met with treatment and services, the 2026 policy focuses only on police actions and does not mandate diversion as CPP recommends.
“The 2026 policy remains strictly focused on police action and completely fails to address protocols for diversion or community-based crisis response,” wrote Ray Kelly, the CPP’s executive director. “By failing to guide officers on when not to be the primary responders, the policy misses a critical opportunity for systemic harm reduction.”
Cohen said the new DNS will allow for the possibility of co-response, or police officers responding to potentially dangerous calls with clinicians. In a situation like Brooks’, for example, a clinician could have taken the lead while an officer stood by ready to help if needed.
“I think every officer should have some degree of training, but I think what’s also important is that we not overly rely on police to address mental health,” Cohen said. “Police officers are not clinicians, and even with significant and serious training, I think we should not expect them to be clinicians.”
Worley has said he wants 100% of Baltimore Police officers to receive Crisis Intervention Team training so they are better prepared to handle mental health emergencies. (Fewer than 30% have actually received the training, according to a Consent Decree report issued this summer.) But two of the officers who responded to Brooks’ house last summer had taken the voluntary CIT training, which is supposed to teach “specialized skills in de-escalation and community referrals.”
Even with the DNS, police will remain a key component of the city’s emergency response to some mental health calls. The new department will test whether the presence of a trained clinician is enough to stop officers from breaking down a struggling elderly woman’s door and shooting her in her home.
Madeleine O’Neill is a freelance reporter in Baltimore.