City council members spent most of a special hearing on the city’s crisis response system focused on the shortcomings of crisis response providers rather than the extremely well-funded police department responsible for the deaths of three Black residents in crisis this summer.
Council members pressed leaders from Behavioral Health Systems Baltimore and Baltimore Crisis Response, Inc. on gaps in service, delays in response times, and the inadequacies of data collection. They questioned the lack of coordination, the limited capacity of the city’s sole mobile crisis team, and the insufficient cultural and community-based responsiveness of existing programs.
They directed almost zero questions to Baltimore Police Department Commissioner Richard Worley.
Every other responding agency was asked to justify delays, explain handoff protocols, and detail how calls are triaged — down to the exact data points on diversion, Emergency Psychiatric Services utilization, repeat calls, and handoff lag.
In practice, the hearing treated the police as auxiliary to the crisis response system rather than its central actor, despite the fact that officer actions are often the determinative factor in whether a behavioral health encounter ends safely or in tragedy.
“We cannot keep allowing our citizens, our seniors, to those with mental health issues, to keep being murdered,” said Bishop Jaron Spriggs, the brother of Pytorcarcha Brooks.
The City Council opened the hearing with Spriggs’s testimony, signaling that his words were meant to set the tone for the meeting. But while his remarks laid bare the human cost of a broken system, the council’s subsequent questioning suggested his inclusion was more performative than substantive. His plea for accountability and a deeper reckoning with police violence was effectively forgotten as the conversation turned toward interrogating mental health advocates to “do better.”
Spriggs spoke not in abstractions but from lived loss. He began by emphasizing the deep, continuing toll that Brooks’s death had exacted on his loved ones — both in mind and body.
“It is our firm belief that what happened to her was a tragedy that did not have to take place,” Spriggs said, pointing out that too many people experiencing mental health crises face a harrowing choice of being murdered or being ignored.
“They should have called for backup, for some help, for someone to tell them what to do, other than to kick the door in and go in and pull out their service revolver on a 70-year-old woman, who with bricks in her pockets, weighed less than 100 pounds, that was wielding or had armed herself with a knife because someone had entered her domain. She did not invite [them], she did not know who they were. No one explained to her. The only thing that she heard was ‘Put down the knife.’”
“They should have called for backup, for some help, for someone to tell them what to do, other than to kick the door in and go in and pull out their service revolver on a 70-year-old woman.’”
Bishop Jaron Spriggs, the brother of Pytorcarcha Brooks
The council members’ questions underscored their tendency to prioritize bureaucratic or programmatic solutions over police accountability. City Council President Zeke Cohen’s words reinforced this approach: “Clearly, we have a lot further to go in terms of how we respond to people, how we treat people, how we recognize their humanity, but also understanding that our public safety professionals in the city had very difficult jobs.”
This statement framed systemic failures as a matter of training or job difficulty rather than lethal misconduct, effectively shielding the police from meaningful scrutiny.
The structural order of the hearing itself contributed to this deflection of accountability. By allowing lengthy presentations before questioning and placing public comment last, the council effectively foregrounded agency operations, funding streams, and diversion metrics, framing the conversation around how to optimize these systems rather than addressing the lethal choices made by officers in the field.
The council’s attention shifted to mental health funding and agency operations, with members scrutinizing how $1.5 million added in 2022 to the Trauma Informed Care Task Force had been utilized. Multiple council members pressed for details on why the funding had not alleviated the need for police presence in behavioral health situations.
While the need for better funding, diversion programs, and community-based responders is undeniable, the session highlighted a critical imbalance: the entity repeatedly pulling the trigger was largely shielded from responsibility.
The Baltimore City Health Department and its affiliated mental health crisis response agencies operate on modest budgets. The Health Department operates on an annual budget of $126 million for all of the health-related needs of Baltimore City and is set to receive $9.8 million earmarked specifically for mental health services for the 2026 fiscal year, which will be an 87% jump in funding from what they are currently allotted. In stark contrast, the Baltimore Police Department receives almost $600 million annually, making it one of the city’s largest line-item expenses. In June, Worley asked the council for an increase in that budget, citing the decrease in homicides in Baltimore City.
Community members who spoke during public testimony were stunned and even distressed by the narrative shifting so heavily toward behavioral health systems, and the officers and systems responsible for the deaths of Dontae Melton Jr., Bilal “BJ” Abdullah, and Brooks being treated as background figures.
Community members who spoke during public testimony were stunned and even distressed by the narrative shifting so heavily toward behavioral health systems, and the officers and systems responsible for the deaths of Dontae Melton Jr., Bilal “BJ” Abdullah, and Brooks being treated as background figures.
“I have sat here for a couple of hours. I have cried in this room. I’ve been listening to all of the madness that has been going on in this town,” Marsha Jews, host of local radio talk show and a 74-year-old East Baltimore resident, said.
“They are killing, murdering citizens of Baltimore…Our police department is killing our citizens in this town.”
Her testimony turned deeply personal. She demanded to know why it had become “so easy and comfortable” for police to shoot and kill Baltimoreans.
While councilmembers parsed programmatic details, Jews brought the stakes into the room.
“That could be me. I’m 74 years old. Ain’t no telling what I’ll be like waking up in the morning, and some police officers — because they heard something on the street — I could be dead…This is real. This is real, and I want everybody to take what I’m saying, because it could be your own family.”
With Cohen interrupting her to say her testimony time was ending, Jews pushed to finish her thoughts: “I gotta get this out. I hear you. I know that I hear you. But this is real serious, because it could be me, my daughter, or my grandson, or anybody in here. And if our police department can’t manage that, they need to change who is running the police department, and you need to get a new one.”
While council members asked agency officials about coordination and budgets, Jews cut to the heart of the matter: the police department’s culture and the lethal consequences for residents.
She made clear what the council had sidestepped all evening: mental health crises are not broken bones, yet the city’s lack of infrastructure means police become the default first responders.
While the behavioral health agencies present faced intense scrutiny, the Baltimore Police Department escaped almost entirely unscathed during this process, a point not lost on residents who waited three hours to speak during the public testimony portion of the meeting.
“It has been distressing to sit in this hearing for hours and hear officials try to put blame everywhere but on the police,” said Jack Lewis, a resident of district 11.
City officials and community advocates alike have pointed out that Baltimore’s behavioral health agencies carry their own share of responsibility. Chronic underfunding, fragmented coordination, and limited capacity have left gaps in care that often surface during moments of crisis.
Yet, these systemic shortcomings do not absolve the police of accountability. Regardless of whether mental health services are under-resourced, it is law enforcement officers who ultimately decide whether to discharge their weapons or apply restraints, community members stressed.
Efforts to expand funding, training, and infrastructure in behavioral health will likely take years to implement fully. In the meantime, residents stressed that the city cannot afford delays when lives are at immediate risk during encounters between police and community members in crisis.
Throughout public comment, BPD’s lack of accountability was on full display. Commissioner Worley, notably, walked out early and remained absent for over half an hour, underscoring the disconnect between the police department and the community it claims to serve. When he was there, he averted his eyes from the public testimony speakers entirely, his gaze shifting between looking straight at the council or down at the floor. He never looked a speaker in the eyes, even when they turned toward him and called him out directly.
“Healthcare or handcuffs, at the federal level, this choice is clearly the latter. Our government is gutting social services at the same moment it’s ramping up military spending, ICE terror and deploying National Guard in our cities. Today, the elected leaders of Baltimore face the same underlying question: will we invest in the people, meaning real spending on harm reduction, or will we continue to subsidize police violence to capture, disappear and kill our neighbors?” Lewis said.
“Dispatching armed agents to find people in crisis is a proven way for the state to kill people, in particular, Black people.”
“We know cops get to the scene faster because they have more money, more people, and more cars,” Lewis continued. “Council members, we ask you to live up to your title as public servants and replace BPD with wraparound services, not more training for BPD. Replace them. Do not send BPD as co-responders. Replace them.”
Several dozen community members testified during the hearing, bringing together a wide range of perspectives from across Baltimore’s neighborhoods. Residents spoke not only as family members and neighbors but also as future healthcare professionals, advocates, and long-time community members, reflecting the city’s social, racial, and generational diversity. Their testimonies showcased the relevance of the issue and their longing for accountability.
The stakes of the hearing brought forward a cohort of Johns Hopkins medical students, two of whom spoke to the council in their white coats.
Allowing BPD to continue responding to mental health calls but just with more training like the council suggests is a death sentence to people in the community, said Benjamin Eke, a second-year medical student. The answer instead is well-funded, timely, centralized, and widely popularized infrastructure to aid with mental health, he said.
“It’s not a question of if; it’s simply a matter of when. This is a genuine public health crisis. We need behavioral health infrastructure, not BPD involvement, and we need the officers that commit these murders to be held accountable.”
“We need behavioral health infrastructure, not BPD involvement, and we need the officers that commit these murders to be held accountable.”
Benjamin Eke, a second-year medical student at Johns Hopkins
“Anything less than that is complicity in killing members of our community.”
Crystal Favorito, a peer of Eke’s, noted the direct consequences for aspiring healthcare providers.“Many of [us] are interested in going into psych and working with patients who have mental health disorders. But unfortunately, we can’t do that if the patient is detained or killed before they make it to the hospital,” she said.
“BCRI as well as a lot of the other organizations in this city caught a lot of flack today for outreach or spending, for mobile crisis response time, but in these situations, that wasn’t the issue — the issue was the police killed someone when a behavioral health provider should have been contacted.”