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By Scott Maucione, WYPR
This article is from a partnership that includes WYPR, NPR, and KFF Health News.
BALTIMORE — In March in a McDonald’s parking lot off a busy street, mental health clinician Michala Williams met a 38-year-old woman in a car.
“So, you called the police for help?” Williams asked the woman, who was sobbing uncontrollably and said she sometimes thinks about harming herself.
She told Williams she has children ranging from age 2 to 22, she was dealing with health issues, and that her fiancé had recently been jailed. She felt so overwhelmed she couldn’t eat.
The woman, who asked not to be named so that she could freely discuss her mental health, explained she’d tried to get help the previous month by driving to the hospital but got pulled over on the way because her car registration had expired.
“I don’t care if I get pulled over,” she said. “But I was saying, ‘I don’t know what to do. I just want to go to the hospital.'”
The officer arrested her for acting erratically, so instead of going to the hospital she went to jail.
Baltimore logged 1.68 million calls to 911 in 2024, but tens of thousands of them didn’t require traditional emergency services, like police, firefighters, or EMTs, according to Tahir Duckett, an expert in community safety at Georgetown Law.
Instead, the calls were about, for example, a homeless person who fell asleep in a store, a person who seemed confused in a public park, and someone who was yelling at passersby on the street.
Such calls “don’t require a badge, a gun, and handcuffs to resolve,” Duckett said.
Often those people end up in jail instead of getting the help they need, he said. A study recently found that when a non-law enforcement team responded to 911 calls in Durham, North Carolina, it resulted in fewer arrests than when police responded — especially for callers who were Black, men, or ages 25-39. Police responses can also lead to trauma for that person or a less satisfactory outcome than another community service response would produce, Duckett said. The idea behind the Baltimore mobile crisis teams — and the new service — is to find out what people in crisis actually need, and what can help prevent them from being involved in the emergency system.
For example, the person falling asleep in a store may need connection to community housing. The goal is to reduce violence, get people proper resources, and avoid the cycle of incarcerating people dealing with poverty, addiction, and mental health.
Rebecca Neusteter, executive director of the Health Lab at the University of Chicago, studies the impacts of services like these. She said they offer peace of mind for callers that “they’re going to be met with the right response at the right time.”
“We also see responders themselves feeling like they have a better toolbox in their ability to pursue actual resolution to these calls,” she said.
To expand its system, Baltimore looked to cities — including Durham — that have adopted similar models to reroute callers who don’t need emergency responders.
Durham’s diversion program is called the Holistic Empathetic Assistance Response Team, or HEART. The program estimates it has diverted more than 12,000 calls in four years. It said police backup was needed for only 0.02% of those calls and that response times have improved for all types of 911 calls.
Durham has collected descriptions of the HEART calls, showing that nonpolice responders in Durham have helped with everything from finding housing for a woman fleeing domestic violence to setting up medical appointments for a homeless veteran.
In one case, a hotel manager called 911 asking for help finding a blind man housing for the night, since the hotel didn’t have accessible rooms available. The HEART responders booked him a room and the next day provided a ride to meet with an organization that could help secure housing.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF. This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Learn more about KFF Health News.