Baltimore Is Rethinking What It Means To Call 911 — And Who Responds

Baltimore is rerouting some 911 calls away from police and toward mental health clinicians and peer counselors, using roughly four hundred million dollars from opioid settlement funds to expand the program citywide, KFF Health News reports. Officials say tens of thousands of the city's 1.68 million annual 911 calls don't need police, firefighters, or EMTs — cases like a confused person in a park or someone experiencing a mental health crisis — and that routing them to specialized teams instead can mean help rather than an arrest. The approach follows similar programs in cities like Durham, North Carolina, where a comparable diversion team says it's rerouted over twelve thousand calls in four years with police backup needed just a fraction of a percent of the time. Baltimore's homicide rate has dropped sixty percent since 2021, even as the city logged roughly a thousand overdose deaths a year from 2020 to 2023.

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