In a fast food restaurant parking lot off a busy road, Michala Williams, a mental health clinician, is meeting a 38-year-old woman in the car.

“So, you called the police for help?” Williams asked the woman. She’s sobbing uncontrollably and said she feels like she’s a danger to herself. She has multiple children ranging from age 22 to 2, she’s dealing with health issues and her fiancé was recently put in jail. She feeling completely overwhelmed and can’t even eat. WYPR is not divulging her name for medical privacy reasons.

The woman tried to get help in February by driving to the hospital.

“I was on the way to the hospital and got pulled over, and he said that my tags were bad,” the woman said. “I don't care if I get pulled over, 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.

“I had to sit inside of a cold cell. I couldn't use the bathroom or anything,” the woman said.

Today, she decided to call 911, the dispatcher recognized the woman didn’t need a police response, but instead needed Baltimore’s Mobile Crisis Team, which brings a clinician and a peer to people in mental health distress.

By the end of an hour-long conversation Williams is setting the woman up with a handful of services including a referral to a psychiatrist, a therapist, legal help and a case manager to determine eligibility for government services for her child with autism.

For years, the mobile crisis team has been one way Baltimore has diverted calls away from police and into the hands of mental health professionals.

However, the units only have a limited scope, focused on people in mental health crises, but Baltimore says with the nearly $600 million it received from opioid settlements it now has the opportunity to build a 24/7 service focused on situations where law enforcement isn’t needed, but is often called.

The service is one way Baltimore is planning on using the opioid funds in its strategic plan not only to address the immediate impacts of drugs and overdoses, but also the systemic issues that continually put people in crisis or near crisis situations in a perpetual cycle of dealing with emergency services or incarceration.

“In our ecosystem there is a gap for more preventative models that engage with individuals before situations become a medical or safety emergency,” Sara Whaley told the Baltimore City Council in January. “We have a number of options for when someone is in an emergency, but we don't have necessarily, is a coordinated safety net for people who have yet to meet that critical point of crisis service.”

Baltimore has many 911 calls where people need assistance, but the assistance isn’t best served by a police force.

Think about someone who is houseless who falls asleep in a store, a person who seems confused in a park or someone who is yelling at people on the street.

“We'd expect this to amount to tens of thousands of 911 calls each year,” said Tahrir Duckett is an expert in community safety at Georgetown Law. “These are the call types that in other jurisdictions we found oftentimes contain a lot of calls that don't require a badge, a gun and handcuffs to resolve.”

They can also lead to trauma for that person or even an outcome that is less satisfactory compared to another community service response.

The idea is instead of arresting people to find out what kinds of resources they may need and how to connect them to those resources to solve their issue.

For example, the person falling asleep in a store may need connection to community housing.

Rebecca Neustadter, the executive director of the Health Lab at the University of Chicago, looked at the impacts of services like these in a recent study.

“They have offered the community a lot of peace and safety of mind that if they call that, they're going to be met with the right response at the right time,” Neustadter said. “We also see responders themselves feeling like they have a better toolbox in their ability to pursue actual resolution to these calls.”

The goal is to reduce violence, get people proper resources and avoid the constant cycle of incarceration of people dealing with issues related to poverty, addiction and mental health.

Other cities like Durham, North Carolina have adopted similar models, they’ve seen faster response times, more than 12,000 calls diverted in four years and only .02% of the responders have needed police backup.

Anecdotal feedback for Durham’s HEART program is shining.

“Care Navigation reached out to check on a neighbor, a veteran who is unsheltered wheelchair-bound, and who spends much of his time behind a gas station in Durham. He had recently been released from the VA,” one story says. “The HEART EMT sat down to inquire how the neighbor was feeling, while taking his vitals and his blood glucose levels. While the neighbor wasn't in a critical state, he was experiencing pain in his legs, prompting HEART to contact EMS for further support. The neighbor expressed no desire to go to the hospital, and so HEART provided him with a hygiene bag, some food, and some water, letting him know that they were available should he need to reach out.”

Another reports a woman fleeing domestic violence who was able to find housing for her and her children.

Baltimore has already allocated $15 million to the new service, which the opioid settlement mandated.

Now the city is hammering out the details of what the service will look like and how it will be deployed to make a model specifically tailored to Baltimore.