BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM
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.
Too often, those calls still result in arrest, cycling the person through the criminal justice system rather than connecting them to housing, mental health care, or addiction treatment.
Baltimore already runs mobile crisis teams through Behavioral Health System Baltimore, a nonprofit that acts as the city’s mental health department. The teams pair a clinician with a peer counselor and respond to mental health calls in place of police. Now the city is expanding that model to cover a broader range of non-emergency situations, around the clock, seven days a week.
How opioid settlement money is funding it
The expansion draws from roughly $400 million Baltimore has received from opioid-related legal settlements. In 2018, the city opted out of a global settlement with opioid makers and distributors and sued them independently. City officials have since committed those funds to drug-related harms and harm-prevention services: housing, healthcare, education.
Baltimore’s homicide rate fell 60 percent from 2021 to 2025, which made national news. Less covered: roughly 1,000 people a year died of overdose over that same stretch. Violence and addiction run through the same communities, and the program is built on the idea that you have to address both.
What the Durham model shows
Durham, North Carolina, has been running a similar program since 2021. The Holistic Empathetic Assistance Response Team, or HEART, has handled more than 12,000 diverted calls over four years. Police backup was needed for 0.02 percent of them. Response times across all call types improved after the program launched.
The Durham call logs tell you something about the gap this is filling. A hotel manager called 911 because a blind guest needed an accessible room; HEART responders booked the room and arranged a ride to a housing organization the next morning. A domestic violence survivor needed somewhere safe to go. A homeless veteran needed a doctor’s appointment. These situations do not require a police officer.
A separate study found that non-law-enforcement responses led to fewer arrests than police responses, with the strongest effect for Black callers, men, and people ages 25 to 39.
Rebecca Neusteter, who leads the Health Lab at the University of Chicago and studies programs like these, says callers get confidence that the right person is coming, and that responders do better work when they can actually solve something. “We also see responders themselves feeling like they have a better toolbox in their ability to pursue actual resolution to these calls,” she said. Nobody’s arguing that police shouldn’t respond to violence. The real question is who might be better suited to respond to the range of cases that make up everything else.
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