He spent months in jail. The crime? Annoying Baltimore County Police and 911 operators

Ben Conarck

The Baltimore Banner

October 3, 2024

Shortly after turning 28, Jonathan became convinced he “could not function in society.”

Unable to control his erratic behavior, he told police last summer that he was fired “30 times” in the span of a year for “acting out and requiring the attention of supervisors.”

It was around then that Jonathan, who The Baltimore Banner is not fully naming because of the mental health issues surrounding his case, developed a habit of calling first responders — at times 911, and at other times through crisis hotlines or precinct numbers — pleading for help accessing psychiatric care.

But as his condition worsened, the very people who Jonathan called for help arrested him instead.

In August of last year, Jonathan was criminally charged with trespassing after police said he refused to leave a hospital emergency room while seeking psychiatric care. Baltimore County Police Department officers escorted him to one of their precincts and consulted the “Mobile Crisis Team,” which is specially trained to deal with those suffering from mental illness and de-escalate interactions.

Already familiar with Jonathan, the crisis team declined to evaluate him, “due to his repeated calls to the hotline after officers cleared the calls for service and gave [Jonathan] multiple resources and chances,” according to his statement of charges.

For that, Jonathan was charged with “telephone misuse: repeat calls,” an offense typically used in harassment cases. He was charged again with the crime in December, months after his first arrest, for continuing to dial the numbers, even complaining to the police who responded to his calls that he was anxious about his upcoming court case over telephone misuse.

Within a week of that second charge, Jonathan was in jail.

Jonathan’s journey through the criminal justice system, which included five months in the Baltimore County Detention Center prior to his placement in a state-run psychiatric facility, illustrates a wider problem in the county and throughout Maryland. With under-resourced mental health services, police are often asked to be the first responders to people with mental illness, even when their behavior is less of a public safety threat and more of a nuisance.

If that person isn’t cooperative, officers typically resort to what they are trained to do: making an arrest.

“We tend to fall back on this impulse that we have to leverage the criminal justice system as a safety net, to make things that are difficult in society just go away,” said Shannon Scully, director of justice policy and initiatives at the National Alliance on Mental Illness. “But they’re not in fact going away.”

Though Jonathan’s case might seem unusual, he’s not alone. Since charging Jonathan for the second time in December last year, Baltimore County Police and prosecutors have charged five others under the “telephone misuse” law for cases related to 911 calls or crisis hotlines, according to a Baltimore Banner review of court records.

A 78-year-old man was charged for repeatedly calling 911 because his sliding glass door was broken and he was unable to access his kitchen. A 33-year-old was charged for calling 911 over false emergencies that his mother described as paranoid delusions.

A 34-year-old was charged after contacting the crisis hotline 62 times but not stating a clear reason why. Baltimore County Police said the 34-year-old’s charges were “filed in error” and have since been dropped.

Lt. Kathryn Greenbeck, commander of the Baltimore County Police Department’s Behavioral Assessment Unit, which oversees its Mobile Crisis Team, said The Banner raised fair questions, but stressed that the department trains its officers to use arrests only as a last resort in mental health cases.

“We take every step we possibly can take to connect people with treatment,” Greenbeck said. “Treatment means voluntary. We can’t force someone to do it. And if they’re continuing to commit those offenses that are escalating and going down that road and going into the criminal realm, it is a source of assistance to get them court-mandated treatment.”

Experts in crisis intervention response who reviewed the cases identified by The Banner had a different view.

Scully, of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said the people arrested for telephone misuse struck her as very likely dealing with serious mental illness: those “who are going to get left behind.”

“These are the folks that have the worst health outcomes when they end up in the justice system,” she said. “In general, there is going to be a lot of challenges getting them back to recovery.”

It is for that reason, Scully said, that the cases of telephone misuse demanded more “critical thinking” from first responders. For instance, if someone likely suffering from mental illness is repeatedly calling 911 because their door is broken, find a way to get the door fixed. The 79-year old charged in January still has an active warrant out for his arrest.

“We’ve done a really good job in our society of drilling into people’s heads that, if you need help, dial 911,” Scully said. “There needs to be other resources where we are equipping that system and we don’t just criminalize these behaviors, because going to jail is not going to help them long-term. There’s no rehabilitation in jail.”

On the contrary, many of those with severe mental health issues are held in confinement while in jail, which is known to worsen their conditions. Jail officials in Baltimore County conceded during a sanctions hearing in May the great difficulty they have in managing their many detainees with mental health needs, including scores of people who were stuck there on a waitlist to be admitted to a state-run psychiatric facility.

Jonathan was one of the five such detainees underlying that sanctions hearing, which ended with a Baltimore County judge fining state health officials $608,000 for failing to clear bed space in their psychiatric facilities.

People like Jonathan, who are deemed too mentally ill to stand trial over their criminal charges, or otherwise ordered to a psychiatric hospital, are waiting in Baltimore County and across the state, sometimes for 180 days or more to be admitted, the hearing revealed. That’s well past the 10-day deadline set by Maryland law. Many of them, like Jonathan, are charged with minor offenses.

Amy Watson, a professor at Wayne State University and a leading researcher in crisis response intervention, said the telephone misuse cases in Baltimore County make clear the need for an “assertive community treatment” or ACT Team, which can connect people struggling with mental illness to services by engaging them in the community, outside of the justice system.. The county does not currently have such a team, though the regional crisis hotline operates a similar program that responds to 988 calls and is shared between several counties.

Watson said the perspective shared by County Police and prosecutors, that arrests in cases such as Jonathan’s are appropriate because court-mandated treatment can force someone into psychiatric care, typically involving involuntary medication, “doesn’t recognize that medications are not great for everybody.”

“They have some really significant side effects, some pretty significant health risks as well, so they’re not benign,” Watson said. “It would be nice if there was a way for the mental health system to try harder to engage him before going to, ‘We want to force him on medication.’”

When Jonathan was criminally charged after an emergency room visit in August, it set off a pattern that would repeat itself for months: Police, prosecutors and even medical professionals questioned whether he was actually suffering from mental illness, instead accusing him of attention-seeking behavior.

Prior to his arrest, at the MedStar Franklin Square Medical Center in Rossville, a nurse and security officer called police on Jonathan and complained that he refused to leave. According to the police report, Jonathan said he had left his wallet there the day before, when he was seeking psychiatric care.

Jonathan was again saying he needed care, but was being uncooperative and “refused to check himself in,” hospital workers told police. In other police reports, Jonathan was described as having difficulty being admitted to an emergency department due to his refusal to have blood drawn, often part of a hospital’s standard procedures.

The nurse at Franklin Square told Jonathan, according to police, that “he was being discharged because he was not having a psychiatric episode.”

Baltimore County Police officers attempted to defuse the situation by suggesting Jonathan “get a Lyft/Uber ride to another facility or back to his home in Essex,” but Jonathan responded that he “would continue to call 911 until officers responded out to him” if he was taken away from the hospital.

“It should be noted that as [Jonathan] was stating that he was having a psychiatric episode he remained calm and coherent,” police wrote in their statement of charges.

MedStar did not return requests for comment on Jonathan’s case. A family member of Jonathan did not respond to messages from a reporter.

When Jonathan was brought to the police precinct for the first time, he requested to speak to the Mobile Crisis Team, but they had already dealt with him on four separate calls, including unsuccessfully transporting him to an inpatient psychiatric facility and a different hospital for treatment, according to his statement of charges.

MedStar did not return requests for comment on Jonathan’s case. A family member of Jonathan did not respond to messages from a reporter.

When Jonathan was brought to the police precinct for the first time, he requested to speak to the Mobile Crisis Team, but they had already dealt with him on four separate calls, including unsuccessfully transporting him to an inpatient psychiatric facility and a different hospital for treatment, according to his statement of charges.

In addition to trespassing, Jonathan was also charged with “telephone misuse: repeat calls” because of his repeated calls to 911 and the mobile crisis hotline.

Over the next few months, Jonathan continued to call the Mobile Crisis Team, mental health crisis hotline, 911, and a local precinct “multiple times a day” in reference to him being suicidal, according to the police report charging him with telephone misuse for the second time, in December. The officer who wrote the report put the word suicidal between quotation marks.

“[Jonathan] has stated on multiple occasions he ‘just wants attention from police,’” the officer wrote. “When [Jonathan] does not get his way, he repeatedly calls 9-1-1.”

Watson, the professor who reviewed Jonathan’s case, noted that behavior that might seem like it is “attention seeking” can in fact be driven by mental illness. It was interesting, Watson said, that the officer who wrote the December statement of charges against Jonathan included a comment he made to another officer about her being “cute.”

“That’s not illegal,” Watson said. “It might be annoying, and inappropriate, but it’s not a reason to arrest someone.”

The officers’ annoyance with Jonathan, and their disbelief that he had serious mental health needs, comes across clearly in the second statement of charges. It runs through a catalog of interactions between Jonathan and officers, repeatedly framing his behavior as attention-seeking.

Describing a hospital visit in December, the statement of charges details: “At times Jonathan would briefly stand up from a seated position and emit a high-pitched moderate volume scream. When he would do this his eyes would look around the room as to see who was watching him, while having a smile on his face.”