When 25-year-old Alex LaMorie called Howard County Police for help during a mental health crisis, his family expected officers trained to de-escalate the encounter. Instead, police fatally shot the Columbia man, who had autism.

Advocates say LaMorie’s March 1 death reflects a broader problem across Maryland and nationwide: Police are often the first responders to mental health crises, and too often, those encounters turn deadly — even in Howard County, widely considered a leader in crisis response, with most officers trained in crisis intervention and behavioral health specialists available 24/7.

“That goes to show you how much more there is to learn and how much more there is to invest in the resources needed for these types of situations,” said Scott Gibson, chief operating officer at Melwood, a family of nonprofits supporting people with disabilities in Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia.

Baltimore Police shot a 48-year-old woman undergoing a mental health crisis in January after specially trained officers weren’t available to respond. In June, Baltimore Police also shot and killed a 70-year-old woman experiencing a behavioral health crisis.

A Baltimore County family recently called for an investigation into a 2025 police shooting that paralyzed their 27-year-old son with autism in the midst of a mental health crisis. In September, Cambridge Police shot and killed a suicidal, naked man who wielded a knife.

Advocates warn that an inconsistent, underfunded police response to wellness calls will continue to drive up deaths, unless there’s reform.

“Cities and communities are tired of watching these videos of people in mental health crisis being killed by police and are wondering: Do we have another option here?” asked Tahir Duckett, executive director at Georgetown Law’s Center for Innovations in Community Safety.

Research shows roughly 25% of fatal police encounters nationwide involve someone undergoing a mental health crisis, while more than 10% of police encounters involve a person exhibiting signs of a mental health disorder.

“I think it’s fair to ask ourselves: If we know this about mental health, are we resourcing it enough in our budgets?” Gibson said.

In response to LaMorie’s death, Howard County purchased 200 Tasers for its patrol officers to carry. Every Howard Police officer who directly interacts with the public will now carry a Taser, according to Howard Police spokesperson Sherry Llewelyn, who said officers are already authorized to use pepper or OC spray, beanbag shotguns and rubber projectiles.

Some questioned why the officers weren’t already equipped with all the less-lethal alternatives.

“There’s absolutely no excuse for any agency right now in the police world not to have all the less-lethal devices that are available to them at their fingertips,” Carroll Sheriff James T. “Jim” DeWees said.

Other departments use beanbag shotguns or train officers in the SafeWrap System, a technique to restrain people undergoing mental health crises without injuring them.

Most police agencies in the region offer a 40-hour Crisis Intervention Training program; however, the percentage of officers trained varies by nearly 80% agency to agency. With officers constantly answering mental health-related calls, this training also isn’t enough to solve the problem, advocates say.

“That’s often not going to be enough to change the outcome, and these incidents (will) keep happening,” said Heather Warnken, executive director of the University of Baltimore’s School of Law Center for Criminal Justice Reform. “We need to be more forward-thinking and courageous about what those changes need to look like.”

Training is a ‘seat belt’

DeWees said his deputies respond to wellness calls “almost every day.”

Agencies across the region offer courses on mental health first aid and partner with groups including Pathfinders for Autism. Others use trainings like the jiujitsu-based SafeWrap System, which teaches officers how to de-escalate situations without injury.

The Baltimore Police Department’s SWAT unit underwent SafeWrap training Thursday.

But the core training in handling mental health response is a 40-hour Crisis Intervention Training, which gives officers advanced mental health and behavioral awareness, de-escalation techniques and trauma-informed practices.

About half of Carroll County deputies have received CIT training. Montgomery County has 99% of officers certified in CIT, compared with 11% in Baltimore County, where an additional 26% have partial CIT training.

About 80% of Howard Police are certified, and roughly 30% of Harford County Sheriff’s Office authorized law enforcement have received the training. Baltimore City Police has certified 28% of patrol officers, while 27% of Anne Arundel Police are trained in it.

Duckett compared CIT training to “wearing a seat belt.”

“It’s valuable, it’s important. Every officer should have it,” Duckett said. “Given the number of people in mental health crisis that police officers deal with each year, a single 40-hour training is actually woefully insufficient.”

Gibson agreed: “A 40-hour training may not be enough when you throw people in very high-tense, dangerous situations. Instincts are going to kick in. We are wired to protect ourselves.”

But just as a seat belt doesn’t prevent all car accidents, CIT training doesn’t prevent all police shootings.

“You can do everything humanly possible and still have the same outcome that you saw in Howard County,” DeWees said. “You just pray that it’s not going to end up that way.”

In addition, understanding of autism and developmental disabilities in general is constantly evolving, which is why Gibson said training should be refreshed frequently.

“We know more about neurodiversity today than we did a week ago,” he said. “There has to be a continual commitment to learning, because what we’re learning continues to evolve.”

Mobile crisis team and co-responder model

DeWees said deputies sometimes have received a call for a mental health crisis and committed someone to a hospital, only to return to the same caller 12 hours later. It’s the reason the 12-year sheriff called Carroll County’s mobile crisis team “very successful.”

“It’s just so cyclical that nothing is solved, but having the (behavioral health) units that can divert those resources from the hospital to a nonprofit or someone in the community really works well,” he said. “They know the individual diagnosis of a person that’s in crisis.”

Advocates and law enforcement leaders largely agree that behavioral health specialists should play a larger role in these calls, though they differ on whether those responders should go alone or alongside police.

“At the very least, when there is a mental health component to a call, a mental health professional needs to be on the scene,” Duckett said.

Since the turn of the century, most Maryland jurisdictions have established mobile crisis teams, pairing licensed specialists with peer recovery specialists, crisis specialists and, sometimes, a police officer.

Howard County Police partners with Grassroots Crisis Intervention to send out two teams available at all times of the day — a relationship that began in 2001. In fiscal 2025, the teams responded to more than 900 interventions.

“The programs tend to be extremely effective,” said Dr. Mariana Izraelson, executive director of Grassroots. “Many times we work to evaluate the person at that point and determine how to move forward.”

But demand and limited funding can blunt the program’s effectiveness.

In Baltimore, data analyzed last summer showed an increase in behavioral health calls, with a decrease in calls diverted to professionals. In the 70-year-old’s death last summer, the city’s lone mobile crisis team wasn’t called, Police Commissioner Richard Worley said at a news conference last summer.

“We give (officers) the training we can give them to deal with this,” Worley said at that news conference. “People that aren’t police officers have to help us address this with getting treatment for these individuals.”

When asked if Howard’s mobile crisis team was called in LaMorie’s death, Llewellyn wrote to The Sun: “When a situation evolves quickly, time does not allow for the (mobile crisis team) to respond, which is why it’s important to train patrol officers in crisis intervention.”

The role of these specialists, some say, is just not enough.

If someone is experiencing a mental health crisis without a weapon, Duckett said, behavioral health specialists should be the primary responders — following in the footsteps of cities such as Durham, North Carolina, and Denver.

Since dispatchers send emergency medical services personnel to scenes without police, the same standard should apply to mental health specialists, Duckett said. If the scene escalates, he said the specialists can always call police for backup.

DeWees called it “ridiculous” to send a behavioral health specialist into a situation alone, where they could be seriously injured or killed.

It’s a concern advocates understand. While Duckett said there is evidence unarmed responders can handle a wide range of calls alone, he said the co-responder model — in which specialists accompany police on scene to offer advice — is appropriate in some situations.

DeWees said he has no “hesitations” with the co-responder model, but resources and money are a roadblock. He added the system in place in Carroll, which hasn’t had a shooting by police in over a decade, works “remarkably well.”

“Because of limited funding, I’d love to have them 24-7, 365 running around, but there just simply isn’t that need right now for what takes place in this county,” DeWees said.

Funding to hire these licensed clinicians, who are already few in number, can be expensive. But, Gibson said it’s a worthwhile investment.

“As we get more clarity on the intersection of mental health, developmental disability and law enforcement, have we invested enough?” he asked. “The answer is we probably haven’t.”

The information gap

While Gibson supports investment for alternative approaches for law enforcement, he said the solution to this problem begins long before 911 is called.

“We’ve got to step back and we’ve got to make sure that the safety net in the community is robust enough that we can prevent more of these calls from even happening,” he said.

Gibson said often the resources are in place, but people don’t know where to go.

This information gap is part of the problem. When people don’t know where to go, they often default to 911, Gibson said.

Warnken said that although many support changing police responses to wellness calls, disagreements over approach have stalled major reform, resulting in only incremental adjustments.

“We default to continuing to do business as usual,” she said. “We need to be more bold, courageous and innovative.”

Melissa Rosenberg, executive director of the Autism Society of Maryland, which led the creation of LaMorie’s apartment building, said the organization is calling for a “revamped comprehensive response” to mental health crises from the initial phone call to who is responding onsite.

“Alex called the police for help,” Rosenberg wrote in an email. “He had not committed a crime.”

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