Baltimore is making headway in its efforts to expand harm reduction services amid the increasingly deadly overdose crisis, Mayor Brandon Scott announced Monday.
Details of the ongoing efforts came in the mayor’s biennial update to Baltimore’s Comprehensive Violence Prevention Plan, which Scott first implemented in 2021. In the report, Scott touted progress in providing services to those struggling with addiction and connecting them to local resources.
“This Biennial Update is our roadmap to sustain the progress we’ve seen, while also adjusting to meet the ever-evolving public safety needs of our city,” Scott said in a statement. “We must continue to do everything in our power to build real, meaningful public safety that prioritizes partnership with our communities and engages with residents in a meaningful way.”
Since 2022, the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement has allocated $300,000 in American Rescue Plan funding to six harm reduction organizations, according to the report.
Those organizations include Asylee Women Enterprise; Charm City Care Connection; Holistic Life Foundation; Intersection of Change; NAMI Metropolitan Community Healing; and Tuerk House.
The Baltimore City Health Department has also conducted naloxone training with 11,000 residents and city employees since 2022. It plans to hold 2,500 community trainings, distribute more than 5,700 naloxone kits and train at least 5,000 individuals by the end of this year.
Aside from training and providing resources, the city has also developed strategies to respond to overdoses directly.
Through partnerships with multiple local organizations, the city has bolstered its overdose response capabilities by creating outreach teams to respond to overdose spikes and work with the fire department to identify overdose survivors, the report states.
In addition, city agencies are working on data-driven strategies to confront the opioid crisis, including potentially using geospatial data to map out overdose hotspots.
The 66-page report detailed a plethora of other initiatives, including by the police, to curb violence in the community.
But while Scott’s administration touted a historic 20% increase in homicides last year — which it attributed to the mayor’s public safety strategies — the same hasn’t been true for overdoses.
The city saw 1,039 overdose deaths last year, a 5.1% increase over the year prior. And, with 177.4 overdose deaths per 100,000 people, Baltimore has the highest death rate of any city in the nation.
In response, Scott’s administration has taken some emergency matters out of the police’s purview.
For example, the city has worked to divert certain 911 calls to community partners and behavioral health specialists, putting less pressure on police while preventing unwanted police interactions with some of the population.
Through the city’s 911 Behavioral Health Diversion Program, created in 2021, there have been nearly 600 “attempted diversions” to the national 988 crisis hotline, according to the report.
About half of those calls were solved by the helpline, although the remaining calls were redirected to 911. Mobile crisis teams were deployed on 187 occasions.
In 2022, the city allocated $1.5 million to Baltimore Crisis Response Inc. to help with these services, and the city is now receiving pro-bono technical assistance as a part of its involvement with the Harvard Government Performance Lab’s Alternative 911 Emergency Response program.
The work is estimated to have saved the police department 175 hours and the fire department 317 hours.
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