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

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. “I had to sit inside of a cold cell. I couldn’t use the bathroom or anything,” the woman said. On the day she met Williams, she’d decided to call 911. The dispatcher recognized the woman didn’t need a police response but instead needed one of Baltimo...