911 Behavioral Health Calls Surge While Baltimore Diverts Fewer to Crisis Teams

A Baltimore Sun data analysis found the number of 911 calls referred for behavioral-health diversions plunged from roughly 450 in 2023 to just over 325 in 2024, with only 105 diversions recorded through the first week of May 2025, even as behavioral-health call volume climbed, a gap that left police handling more crisis scenes and preceded at least two deaths in June that city reports tied to mental-health episodes. The Sun’s July 17, 2025 story sparked City Council hearings and renewed scrutiny of who responds when a Baltimore resident is in crisis.

City Hall pushed back with an account of reforms. Jonas Poggi, spokesman for Mayor Brandon Scott, said, “We have been working to improve the ability of the 911 call-takers to identify opportunities for diversions, and our efforts are paying off.” City statements and follow-up reporting say agencies and lawmakers “overhauled parts of the system” after the Sun investigation and that subsequent data show a more than 50 percent increase in diversions in the second half of the year, though the materials supplied with those claims do not specify the months or raw counts behind that percentage.

The 911 Diversion Pilot began as a city program on June 16, 2021, in partnership with Baltimore Crisis Response, Inc. (BCRI) and Behavioral Health System Baltimore (BHSB), routing two initial call types, PSYCH ALERT (non‑suicidal and alert) and SUIC ALERT (suicidal and alert), toward the 24/7 crisis line (988/Here2Help) and BCRI mobile teams when clinicians deemed on-site response necessary. The CSG Justice Center described Baltimore’s model on October 11, 2022, as an expansion of existing crisis services integrating 988, BCRI mobile crisis teams, the Baltimore Police Department, and Baltimore City Fire Department in co-response roles.

City-published data reside on the Data Baltimorecity 911 Diversion dataset, which lists 2,245 records and shows a published date of January 19, 2022 and an update timestamp of January 16, 2026. The dataset page describes the pilot’s “central mission” as matching people “to the most appropriate and available resource” and defines co-response as when patients are connected to the crisis line and BPD or BCFD provide some degree of response. The Sun’s diversion totals through early May 2025 come from public datasets and analysis; the city’s post‑investigation >50 percent increase claim does not appear with month-by-month counts in the supplied materials.

The human toll behind the numbers has been stark. The Sun published a photo caption showing investigators at the scene where Baltimore Police fatally shot a 70-year-old woman in the 2700 block of Mosher Street after she lunged with a knife during what the paper described as a mental-health crisis. Foxbaltimore reported that in June at least two residents thought to be experiencing mental-health episodes died during encounters with police. Police Commissioner Richard Worley said his department was investigating why a crisis response team was not called in at least one case and cautioned, “Police officers are police officers. We give them the training we can give them to deal with this, but behavioral health is a medical issue that we have to address, and people that aren’t police officers have to help us address this.”

City officials and advocacy groups say the reforms and expanded routing to 988 aim to reduce police-only responses, shorten wait times, and send more trained behavioral-health clinicians into neighborhoods such as Mount Vernon and West Baltimore. Verifying the city’s claim of a post-investigation rebound will require the month-by-month diversion counts, triage protocol changes, and mobile-team response-time data that the public 911 Diversion dataset and agency records should contain; until those figures are visible, City Council hearings and BPD investigations remain the principal avenues for measuring whether the overhaul has cut police responses and improved safety.