Baltimore to replace aging emergency dispatch system after in-custody death

Listen to this article

Baltimore officials told an oversight panel that they were initiating a long-awaited upgrade to the city’s emergency dispatching system, months after an in-custody death during an outage.

The City Council oversight hearing Thursday followed Mayor Brandon Scott’s appointment of a new information technology director who is spearheading the effort, and the city secured nearly $12 million in state and federal funding for the overhaul.

Although Council President Zeke Cohen cautioned the council would not speak about prior outages due to “legal considerations,” the hearing was also against the backdrop of the outage last June, when Baltimore Police officers waited about 40 minutes for medics before taking an unresponsive Dontae Melton Jr., 31, to a hospital, where he died hours later.

Eleshiea Goode, Melton’s mother, said at Thursday’s hearing that her son “asked for help, and instead of help, he died in the middle of a preventable system collapse.” He was on the street, handcuffed and shackled for nearly 50 minutes on the hottest day of the year, she said. Temperatures reached a high of 105 degrees that day in downtown Baltimore, according to the National Weather Service. Melton’s death was ruled a homicide.

“I’m asking you to fix what broke my son’s life,” Goode said.

Larry Greenberg, an attorney for Goode and other members of Melton’s family, said Friday that his team is still preparing to file a lawsuit and “pursue claims against all those responsible for this horrible and needless loss of life.”

The city’s computer-aided dispatch, or CAD, system routes 911 calls to police and fire dispatchers, and is considered the backbone of the city’s emergency-response communications. It handles about 2.1 million calls per year, according to new Chief Information Officer T.J. Mayotte, but relies on an over-20-year-old software system that has been slated for replacement for years.

City officials said they had obtained $11.7 million in funding from the state and federal governments for a replacement in fiscal year 2027. Mayotte said that the process would go to procurement and vendor selection this summer and fall, but he hesitated to answer council members’ questions on specifics, noting that the exact timeline would be “deeply dependent on the vendors themselves.”

He also noted that $11.7 million “should be the right amount to get this done” but said he didn’t want to say definitively, as “it’ll be a long process with vendors to figure it out.”

He said that ongoing investments in the city’s public safety technology had been showing a return on investment, noting that there have not been any CAD meltdowns in 2026. Cohen had previously said there was a total of 12 meltdowns in 2025 and 2024.

Cohen noted at the hearing that an upgraded CAD system could also integrate an improved system for responding to people in crisis. Melton died the same month as two other police-involved deaths in Baltimore; investigators or friends indicated that all three people who died last June were experiencing mental health crises.

Melton approached a police vehicle on June 24, 2025, seeking help. Officers placed him in handcuffs and restraints because he repeatedly ran into the street, according to a report by Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown’s office.

Officers called for medics five times and waited over 40 minutes due to the CAD malfunction, though they never arrived. After he went unresponsive, police took him to a hospital, where he died hours later.