The brother of 70-year-old Pytorcarcha Brooks, who was shot and killed by Baltimore Police officers last month, demanded “action” in response to his sister’s death — a tragedy, he said, that should have never taken place.

Body camera footage from Brooks’ shooting showed how, in the span of about 30 minutes, the officers who arrived at the scene of Brooks’ behavioral health crisis went from telling a family member they had no ability to enter the home to breaking down the front door with a Taser in hand.

The shooting raised concerns about the officers’ grasp of deescalation tactics, and experts said it was unclear why police would breach the door in that situation, given that Brooks was armed only with a knife and posed no threat to anyone other than herself.

Standing before the Baltimore City Council, Bishop Jaron Spriggs of Mount Carmel Baptist Church described Brooks as a “loving, kind person” who, “with bricks in her pockets, weighed less than 100 pounds.”

“She was a major part of our family, and because of that, we suffer with the trauma of seeing it played out on the television over and over again, to hear others talk about,” Spriggs said. “We need to do more than just talk about stats and things that are on paper. Our policemen have to get some sort of training that they will know what to do in a situation like this.”

That need for training was also on the mind of City Council President Zeke Cohen, who highlighted the Baltimore Police Department’s shortfall of officers trained in crisis de-escalation.

Making that training mandatory, rather than voluntary, was one of three recommendations he made during the oversight hearing to improve what he called a “fragmented, underfunded” system of behavioral crisis response.

But Alexandra Smith, who formerly co-chaired the partnership between the city’s police department and its local behavioral health crisis authority, told The Banner that the department has been advocating for doing that but those discussions have hit a roadblock.

That’s because the U.S. Department of Justice, which has input on department policies due to its federal oversight stemming from the death of Freddie Gray, has signaled that it is a “best practice” to keep the 40-hour training voluntary.

At the hearing, Police Commissioner Rich Worley said he agrees the training should be mandatory. He expressed optimism the department could get it done, saying that getting the Justice Department to agree to that “shouldn’t be a problem.”

Brooks was one of three people who died in police shootings or in custody in June. The other two were Dontae Melton and Bilal Abdullah.

Too few calls getting diverted

In addition to the lack of deescalation training, Cohen diagnosed two other “gaps” in the city’s crisis response system, which relies on a 988 crisis hotline that has been in operation for only about three years and has not fully caught on.

Cohen said too few calls are being diverted from 911 to the hotline, which results too often in police officers being the first line of response to people experiencing mental health crises.

Citing a June report, Cohen said that, from July to December 2024, too few of calls that met eligibility criteria for diversion were moved over to 988.

Dr. Ben Lawner, medical director for the Baltimore City Fire Department, responded that, although the system needs work, there are limits on which calls are eligible for diversion.

Cohen said the capacity of the city to respond is also limited by a lack of behavioral health technicians. That results in an average response time for mobile crisis teams of about 92 to 136 minutes, a wait that Cohen called “way too long.”

The city council president called on the agencies gathered at the hearing — police, fire, 911 call center and the health department — to strengthen the overall system by diverting more calls from 911 to 988, increase funding for mobile crisis response teams and requiring all new police officers to get deescalation training.

He also wants to pull what he said is a fragmented system together, centralizing it under the health department.