At Monday’s city council hearing, Cohen said that “several serious issues” with the computer-aided dispatch system were raised while the council probed crisis response efforts in the wake of three deaths involving police this summer, including one man who died during an outage. Cohen added that it “is absolutely imperative that [the system] never fails.”
“When emergency communications break down, the consequences can be life-threatening,” the Democrat said.
The computer-aided dispatch system is a part of the city’s emergency communications network and routes 911 calls to police and fire dispatchers. Sometimes referred to as CAD, the city’s current system is prone to bugs.
Last summer, Baltimore Police waited nearly an hour for medics to respond after detaining Dontae Melton Jr., a 31-year-old man who authorities said was in the midst of a mental health crisis. Medics never arrived, and Melton died hours later at a hospital where police had taken him.
The Sun found there was a breakdown in the aging communications system after interviewing first responders and analyzing hours of dispatch audio from that night, some of which was missing due to a technical glitch. Body-worn camera footage from the scene showed police officers frustrated with the outage, with one officer even joking that they would’ve been better served by a smoke signal.
Though investigators have not directly tied the outage to Melton’s death, fire union officials said that breakdowns in the ailing dispatch system happened far too often. Earlier this year, the city’s then-IT director said the system “was prone to freeze-ups and outages,” but replacing it would cost up to $15 million. And Baltimore’s 911 director said at budget hearings that the city is doing “more of a disservice than a service” by keeping the system as-is, describing a bug-prone system with a more archaic manual backup system.
The mayor’s office said earlier this year that it was investigating what caused the system to freeze on June 24, the night that Melton was taken into police custody, but that its vendor, CentralSquare, had pushed out a software update the next month “to improve system stability.” The city approved a $2.7 million renewal of its contract with CentralSquare in October.
Meanwhile, the Maryland Attorney General’s Office’s Independent Investigations Division is still investigating how Melton died. His family has announced plans to file a lawsuit in regards to his death.
An advisory from Cohen’s office says that a Legislative Investigations Committee hearing examining the computer-aided dispatch system will be held on Feb. 19, 2026. The resolution introduced to the city council on Monday says that the city’s IT, fire and police departments are invited to discuss maintenance and outages of the CAD system, as well as a timeline and budget regarding its replacement.
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