Moments before Baltimore Police officers used a Taser on, then shot and killed a 70-year-old woman they said lunged at them with a knife last week, they made a pivotal decision now under scrutiny: breaching the door and entering her home.

Baltimore Police have so far released scant details about the events leading up to the June 25 killing of Pytorcarcha Brooks.

But independent and internal reviews of the shooting will almost certainly focus in on one key line of questioning: the timeline leading up to, and reasons behind, the decision to breach the door, which experts in de-escalation tactics said raised serious questions.

The police commissioner said that officers “breached the door,” but it’s not yet clear whether that meant officers broke the door down or otherwise entered the home. Typically, the Police Department provides more details with the release of body camera footage, which is still pending.

Reportedly armed only with a knife, Brooks would have posed no immediate danger to police officers from inside her residence.

“If you breach, you really have to have a reason for imminent threat of serious bodily harm of that person or someone else,” said Ernie Stevens, a law enforcement veteran who helps police develop de-escalation tactics. “I don’t know in that situation why they felt like a breach was necessary.”

Baltimore Police’s policy on de-escalation urges its officers to create distance between themselves and a potentially agitated person in crisis. Among other cautions, it puts an emphasis on “slowing down the pace of the incident,” “waiting out the person” and “avoiding physical confrontation.”

It’s one of several policies that were rewritten after Baltimore Police entered into an oversight agreement with the Justice Department following an investigation into the department spurred by the killing of Freddie Gray in 2015.

An independent February 2024 assessment of the department commended the agency for a “shift in culture” around responding to behavioral health crises, but it also highlighted “areas of concern.”

Chief among them: The department is dealing with a persistent shortage of officers willing to volunteer for a 40-hour “crisis intervention training,” which would focus on de-escalating incidents like the one that ended in Brooks’ death.

As of last week, 273 of Baltimore Police’s 2,026 sworn officers had crisis intervention training, well short of its goal of having at least 30% of sworn officers certified.

In response to questions by The Baltimore Banner, the Police Department said in a statement that it has “explored a variety of ways to encourage participation” in the training, including assigning trained officers who don’t live in the city their own patrol car.

The agency said it is considering making the training mandatory, which some police training experts view as a less-than-ideal solution, because the idea is to have officers with a special interest in de-escalation respond to crisis scenes.

Another key recommendation from the February 2024 assessment was to give “control of the scene” to crisis-intervention-trained officers.

A spokesperson for Baltimore Police said that at least one officer at the scene of Brooks’ shooting had crisis intervention training, but neither of the officers who used their weapons were certified. The department declined to say what role, if any, the crisis-intervention-trained officer played in the decision to breach the door.

Keeping with evolving guidance on how to respond to behavioral health crises, the department has a specialized “crisis response team” that arrives at the scenes with licensed clinicians.

But that team was apparently busy on the day of Brooks’ shooting, responding to a different incident involving a potential suicide attempt, according to media reports. Baltimore Police declined to clarify whether the response team was involved in the attempts to resolve the call at the Brooks residence.

Hours after the shooting, Police Commissioner Rich Worley described the frequency with which police respond to mental health calls as part of a “national crisis.”

But the percentage of mental health-coded calls for Baltimore Police has remained relatively stable after a period of steady decline.

Between July 2024 and December 2024, about 1.3% of the more than 309,000 calls for service to Baltimore Police were under the code of a behavioral health crisis, suicide attempt or emergency petition, according to a recent data report. Most of them were concentrated in the central and western parts of the city.

The report found that less than 1% of those behavioral health calls resulted in a use of force by responding officers.

Still, at the press conference, Worley said that outcome happened too often.

“We’ve done an excellent job with training our officers, getting them to de-escalate these situations,” Worley said. “Unfortunately, this one, they weren’t able to de-escalate, and it ended in tragedy.”

A fatal decision

There is little known about why police decided to breach the door of Brooks’ home on June 25, including the initial call for service that led officers to her doorstep.

It’s also unclear who approved the decision.

Police responded to the scene with firefighters, who told officers that “a woman inside the residence needed assistance and may be experiencing a behavioral health crisis,” Worley said at the press conference.

He added that police and firefighters “attempted to speak with the woman numerous times” and that “at some point, the woman brandished the knife toward the first responders.”

“For her safety, officers were attempting to take her into custody and get her to an area hospital for treatment,” Worley said. “When officers breached the door, they observed a woman holding a knife.”

According to police, officers gave “numerous verbal commands for the woman to drop the knife,” but she “lunged toward officers.” Police said one officer used a Taser “in an attempt to subdue her” but the weapon was “ineffective.”

Officers then attempted to leave the residence, but one of them fell to the floor, at which point the woman lunged at the officer, police said. That’s when a different officer fired two shots, striking Brooks.

Stevens, who now works as deputy division director of behavioral health at The Council of State Governments Justice Center, highlighted the repeated contacts police had with Brooks over the course of the year — some 20 visits to her home in this year alone, including some for behavioral health crises, according to Worley.

If only one or two of those calls resulted in an involuntary commitment, Stevens said, that would indicate that it would be an appropriate response to wait the situation out and hope Brooks would calm down, or come back later to check on her, a policy he described as “disengagement.”

“What is she truly capable of in this situation?” Stevens asked. “You’ve got to find out these things before you just go kick the door in.”

Baltimore Police have so far declined to answer questions about how long officers waited at the scene before breaching the door.

But for Stevens, one major takeaway from the incident should be that “you have to slow things down at the scene.”

He also said the presence of firefighters could suggest opportunities for “cross-training” both police and fire departments to learn about crisis intervention together.

That way, Stevens said, when both agencies are responding, officers can rely on tools that only medics have, such as sedatives, to avoid using force.

Mandatory training?

Baltimore Police said all officer trainees receive 24 hours of behavioral health training in the academy, as well as eight additional hours of that training each year.

The agency said it has six crisis intervention trainings scheduled for the remainder of the year, with each class seating up to 40 participants, including some spots reserved for police dispatchers and call specialists.

“We anticipate increasing our total of CIT officers expeditiously,” the department said in a statement.

The department said it is considering making the training mandatory and “is in the midst of ongoing conversations with our behavioral health partners, who are supportive of this change.”

Clyde Boatwright, the president of the Maryland Fraternal Order of Police who served on the Maryland Police Training and Standards Commission, said that such mandatory training could present a variety of problems, especially in the area of resources.

An additional 40 hours of training for every sworn officer would mean 40 hours away from responding to calls or other specialized police duties, he said.

“Police chiefs look at their budget and they look at how they would have to replace officers to go away to get this training,” Boatwright said. “It’s not that important to them.”

He also spoke to a hesitancy among some officers to take the training, which would put them front and center in difficult situations, for which they could later be blamed.

“That’s the problematic part of forcing officers to go to this training,” he said. “It’s one thing for you to want me to be a better police officer and know the warning signs and how to identify certain things, but now, if I mistake, it’s, ‘You were trained on this day how to respond and you should have identified these different factors.’”

Responding to the recommendations for Baltimore Police to increase crisis intervention training, Boatwright was most intrigued by the directive to hand over control of the scenes to those who have gone through it, even if they aren’t in a supervisory position.

“If I know an officer has tactical training, I’m going to allow them to guide us,” he said.