Baltimore reimagines what 911 can do, with $400 million to back it up
In March, mental health clinician Michala Williams met a 38-year-old woman sobbing in the front seat of her car in a McDonald’s parking lot. The woman had called 911. She had children ranging from age two to 22, a fiancé recently jailed, health issues she was managing alone, and she hadn’t been able to eat. The month before, she’d tried to drive herself to the hospital and gotten pulled over for an expired registration. The officer arrested her for acting erratically. Instead of the hospital, she went to a holding cell.
By the time Williams arrived, the woman had been through the emergency system twice without getting anything from it. By the time Williams left, about an hour later, she had referrals to a psychiatrist, a therapist, legal aid, and a case manager to help determine whether her child with autism qualified for government services.
“She’s been through a lot of trauma, and no one is going to deny that,” Williams said. “But I now have to take all of that and decide, ‘OK, here’s steps 1, 2, and 3,’ because we got to find a little bit of sliver of something to give her some hope that there’s help out here.”
The calls that don’t need a badge
Baltimore fielded 1.68 million calls to 911 in 2024. Many of them, tens of thousands, didn’t require police, fire, or emergency medical services. Someone fell asleep in a store. Someone seemed confused in a park. Someone was yelling at people on the street. Situations where, as Georgetown Law community safety expert Tahir Duckett puts it, a badge and handcuffs are not what the situation needs…