Baltimore is building out a service that changes who arrives when someone calls 911 during a mental health or social crisis, expanding behavioral health responders to operate around the clock rather than within the narrow window mobile crisis teams have covered until now.
The city is drawing on money from roughly $400 million it has received from opioid-related legal settlements, according to reporting from NPR, WYPR and KFF Health News. The scale is more modest than the headline pool suggests: Baltimore's director of overdose response, Sara Whaley, said there is $15 million in settlement funds allocated so far across a broader set of city services, of which the 911 expansion is one part.
