They called for help. The system called their deaths inevitable.
A new ACLU of Maryland report and database on fatal police encounters shows we can – and must, finally – act to prevent medical or mental health emergencies from escalating into tragedies [OP-ED]
Above: Police officers used a Taser on Gamel Antonio Brown of Owings Mills, responding to a call for help after he cut his hand on a broken mirror. He later went into cardiac arrest and died. (File photo)
In 2020, police were called to the Owings Mills home of Gamel Antonio Brown after he cut his hand on a broken mirror.
His family told Baltimore County Police officers there had been no altercation. Brown showed police his bleeding hand. A responding officer even radioed that no backup was needed — just medics.
By the time medics arrived, however, police had physically struggled with Brown, tased him, and restrained him. Within the hour, he was dead. His mother, Marion Brown, still wonders how a call for help led to her son’s death.
Sadly, she is far from alone. Her son is one of 143 people killed in police encounters in Maryland between 2015 and 2023, documented in a new ACLU of Maryland database and report with key findings about these deaths, “Crisis 911.”
Gamel Brown’s death illustrates one of the report’s most urgent findings: nearly half the people who lost their lives in police encounters showed signs of a medical or behavioral health crisis.
In at least 24 cases, someone had called 911 specifically for help handling a medical or mental health emergency. Eric Sopp’s mother, for example, called 911 to report that her son was suicidal. Tawon Boyd called 911 himself during a medical emergency. A motorist called 911 after seeing Deontre Dorsey have an apparent seizure while driving.
In case after case, a call for help led to a tragic death. And because that death occurred in a police encounter, grieving families faced a second blow: fighting an onslaught of police-driven narratives focused more on blaming the victim and suggesting the death was inevitable than asking what could have saved them.
That dynamic feeds a false perception that all such deaths are inevitable, except perhaps a rare few attributable to a few bad actors. The ACLU’s database and report aim to show what families have long known — these deaths result from systemic failures across many institutions, not just policing.
• This commentary was first published by Maryland Matters.
Indeed, the report catalogues horrifying, if familiar, findings about the extent to which our state subjects’ Black people to this specific harm:
Black Marylanders were killed at three times the rate of white Marylanders. Among unarmed victims like Gamel Brown, close to 80% were Black. Among victims 21 or younger, 90% were Black and/or Latine.
Excerpt from the Crisis 911 Database with information on 143 fatal police encounters in Maryland from 2015-2023. (ACLU of Maryland)
Victim Blaming as Damage Control
The report also documents how our institutions perpetuate the myth that we can’t prevent these deaths or their racial disparities.
Police agencies leap into damage control, prioritizing narratives that cast victims as threatening, a tactic that lands especially easily on Black Marylanders in a country already primed to criminalize them.
Maryland’s medical examiner has compounded the problem, repeatedly falsely denying a causal link between police actions and death — in violation of professional standards, a recent audit confirmed — thus reinforcing the same myth.
Maryland’s medical examiner has compounded the problem, repeatedly falsely denying a causal link between police actions and death
And the legal system creates so many barriers and sets such high bars for officer or agency liability in criminal and civil cases that it can be nearly impossible to obtain a criminal conviction or formal judgment of wrongdoing.
Remarkably, during the nine-year study period, not a single on-duty officer was convicted of any crime relating to the 143 deaths.
Steps we can Take
Because the law asks only whether an officer’s actions were “justified,” within a scheme that affords police enormous deference, no one ever asks how the death could have been prevented.
Pursuing the truth or urging us to see how we could do things differently in police encounters is not an attack on police. Rather, it’s a call for courts, state agencies, police departments and the rest of us to recognize that these deaths aren’t an inevitable cost of policing.
Whether an officer acted with outright violence or entirely within policy, the question is the same: What could we have done differently to save this life? What could do we do differently in the future to save lives?
Right now, no one is responsible for answering these questions after any given death. That needs to change. In the meantime, “Crisis 911” offers recommendations grounded in what we already know:
• Reduce the number of police encounters.
• Redirect crisis response away from armed officers and toward trained crisis teams that already exist in pockets of the state but remain underfunded and inconsistent.
• Use the State’s Medical Examiner audit findings to correct and reform custodial death investigations.
• And, perhaps most important, stop treating families as policing’s adversaries and start treating them as stakeholders with insight into what needs to change.
Earlier this year, Alexander LaMorie called 911 for help with a mental health crisis. Police shot him.
LaMorie died because he called for help, just as many others before him documented in the report.
Many of the recommendations offered to police and other government officials in the wake of his tragic death have been suggested before.
Maybe if we had listened better to the families who came before his, his death could have been prevented.
– Sonia Kumar is a senior staff attorney for the ACLU of Maryland.