Baltimore is getting a third branch of public safety. City Council gave final approval Monday night to a bill creating a Department of Neighborhood Safety, an agency meant to send trained civilians, not police officers, to some 911 calls.
Ordinance 26-0221 passed 13-1 on Nov. 9. Councilman Mark Conway of District 4 was the only no vote, and Councilman Antonio Glover was absent, FOX45 reported. The bill now goes to Mayor Brandon Scott, who has said he’ll sign it.
What the department would do
The new agency has two jobs. It takes over the work of the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement, known as MONSE, which runs the city’s violence prevention programs, and writes that work into city law. It also sets up what the mayor calls a formal alternative response service, so a 911 call can go to fire, police, EMS or a DNS team, depending on what the caller needs.
Those DNS teams would include behavioral health clinicians and peer responders, aimed at mental health crises and other calls where a uniformed officer isn’t the right fit. Supporters have pointed to roughly 22,000 nonviolent calls a year that could shift away from police.
“This is a huge step forward in establishing a Department of Neighborhood Safety (DNS) as Baltimore’s third branch of public safety,” Scott said in a statement after the vote. He tied the agency to the drop in homicides and nonfatal shootings over the past five years and said he looks forward to signing the bill “in the near future.”
Cohen’s bill
Council President Zeke Cohen led the legislation. His pitch is partly about officers. “Our officers are asked to do far too much. People experiencing crises and our officers deserve better,” he said after the vote. He has argued that police didn’t sign up to be the city’s mental health system and that moving those calls could eventually cut into police overtime, one of the city’s biggest recurring costs.
“The city is tired of seeing people die in mental health crisis,” Cohen said. He said the next step is hiring an executive director who can build the staff.
The money question
Conway said he likes the idea but not the math. He put the first-year cost at $50 million or more and said the council hadn’t been careful enough with it. “I do think it’s our responsibility as shepherds of the tax dollar to be very thoughtful about how we spend that money and I don’t think we’ve been thoughtful in this decision today,” he said.
He was also skeptical of leaning on overtime savings. The city has cut police overtime before, he said, and then had trouble keeping it down. He wants to see the analysis first.
The full cost is still unknown. WYPR reported about $17 million in seed money to get the agency started, and CBS Baltimore reported the city is separately spending $12.4 million to replace its computer-aided dispatch system, the software that routes 911 calls. A new kind of responder only works if dispatch can send it, so the two projects are tied together.
Timeline
Nobody expects DNS teams on the street right away. City officials have said it could take about a year for the department to be fully up and running. Until then, MONSE’s existing programs continue and 911 calls are handled the way they are now.
More oversight of MONSE
Cohen has also sold the bill as an accountability measure. Moving MONSE out of the mayor’s office and into a stand-alone department gives the council more oversight, he told CBS Baltimore before the vote. “Having them stood up as a stand-alone department, moving them out of the mayoralty and into a department provides an avenue for increased oversight, for increased accountability,” he said.
That matters because MONSE has been under a spotlight this fall, after reports that a senior staff member advocated for the early release of a man police say fatally shot 12-year-old Khloe Ishway at a youth football game on Oct. 3. Conway raised the office’s internal problems when he voted against the bill on second reader, saying the council wasn’t asking enough questions.
Cohen said the city borrowed ideas from crisis response programs elsewhere and “put the Baltimore flair” on them. The difference here is that it’s a permanent department, not a pilot, so every future budget will have to pay for it.
Calvin Riggs covers Baltimore for Voice of Baltimore.
