If the police are the problem, we need to start looking at first response as a whole
Unpopular opinion?
Photo by Monstera
I’ve been engaging in discussions about alternative response teams for mental health crises recently a lot for reasons I won’t disclose for the sake of privacy and decentralizing my personal life from this conversation. Here in the United States, mentally ill people make up a lot of the population experiencing homelessness.
Those people, if causing any sort of societal commotion, usually end up in one of two places: the hospital or jail. The BIPOC community is disproportionately targeted by police officers in all things, however mentally ill people of color- or just those that are “different” are often the victims of brutal attacks.
It’s not ideal for people who need medical treatment to end up in jail or take up a hospital bed when they need more comprehensive resources, and it’s not ideal for the police to respond to mental health calls at all when they have a history of brutalizing people of color.
That’s where alternative response teams come in. These are teams whose job it is to specifically respond to mental health calls where there is no threat of danger.
I think in theory, they’re a great idea, and in practice, they’re probably helping significantly reduce the strain on police officers and medical professionals.
If you’re not aware of this already, I’m an abolitionist - I firmly believe in dreaming of and creating a society where policing as we know it today is gone. We can’t liberate ourselves from systems designed for oppression-initially designed to return enslaved Black people to their white owners-within the confines of that system.
I also don’t view abolition as a black-and-white issue, in the sense that I understand there’s a lot of nuance to it. What does a future without police look like? I don’t know. I also acknowledge that many police officers step into the role hoping to change the system from the inside out. While I don’t think this is possible, I appreciate the good intention. I acknowledge how scary it feels to imagine a world where we don’t use violence to suppress violence.
So when I talk about an alternative response team for mental health crises, I’m trying to move toward a society where police aren’t necessary - at all.
As I was thinking about uncoupling police from other first response units today, I started thinking about first response as a whole. My EMT license expires in 3 days, and I’m okay with that. I’m grateful for all of the insight it gave me. Insight into how much needs to change.
It’s extremely hard to uncouple one first response unit from another. Flight medics transfer to ground medics. Ground medics transfer care to flight medics. EMTs and paramedics need police in order to respond to a domestic violence call. Police need EMTs to clean up their mess. Fire needs police to block off the road. Police needs fire at a car accident to extricate someone and EMS to treat them. We depend on each other, but only one of us carries a gun. As I told my fiance today, “What would I have done if a police officer started attacking someone in front of me? I’d have to make a split-second decision on whether or not to put my life at risk or be complicit.”
It’s also hard to depend on protocols laid out for operation actually working every time. That sentence might be denied by your local Fire Chief or Head of the Office of Emergency Management, but think about how many mass shootings happen in the U.S. each year.
This, of course, is largely due to how many guns we allow to get into the hands of 18-year-old boys. After a mass shooting has happened, we either hear, “ thank goodness the police responded as quickly as they did”( like at the Tree of Life shooting, 2017) or “What the f**k was that response?”( like with the Uvalde shooting).
Every time a response to a mass shooting ( or another mass emergency, like a natural disaster) is deemed inadequate, we’re seeing firsthand the failure of police, fire, EMS, and any other first response units to follow the protocol laid out for the incident. Something or someone didn’t go according to the plan.
At times, it’s an “unprecedented situation”. New Orleans was unprepared for Hurricane Katrina, infrastructure-wise. But truthfully, every situation is unprecedented. We train for unprecedented. We train for things to fail. We train to adapt. Until someone decides that what they want - how they want things to go- is more important than following orders.
This happens more often than you would think because it isn’t just the Police that need to go. EMS and Fire don’t need to go, in my opinion, but they need some changes - wage increases, actual bias training and unlearning, fair working conditions, and up-to-date equipment to name a few.
There are people with a god complex in all fields of first response, people who think they know best. I worked with several police officers- although one specifically comes to mind- who only saw me as a young, inexperienced(okay, this bit was partially true) girl who didn’t know what she was doing and often steamrolled me on calls with my patients so that they could go back to sitting in their cars.
Fire and EMS both see discrimination on the basis of sex and race and are largely male-dominated fields. Fire is notorious for being a boys club, but EMS is often the same way.
The thing is, it’s complicated. These systems exist to save lives and increase health outcomes. They work by working together. Frankly, as long as each field is inherently biased against anyone that isn’t a white man, and they keep feeding off of one another, I think there’s a cap on how much impact things like an alternative response team for mental health crises and good eggs within a broken system can have.
I’m proud to have been someone who rejected those inherent biases. I’m proud of the people who work within the system despite it being stacked against them.
We need Firefighters. We need EMS. I think we can, one day, find a way to live without police. One thing we cannot live without is change within these first response systems.
One reason they never change and are so resistant to change is that people know that we need these services and that only so many adrenaline junkies, like yours truly, exist to fill those roles. Society only pushes so much for fear that pushing too hard would take away that ambulance ride or the person who has the water that will put the stove fire out.
In our inability to hold the first response systems that should make our society safer accountable, we underestimate the inherent good in all human beings and do ourselves a disservice. First responders train to adapt. We’re up to the task.
I’ve written about this topic recently:
Why America’s Emergency Medical System is in Urgent Need of an Overhaul
Church Signs
The vet down the street put up the best sign this week. You can see it below, but the picture I got is very blurry. It reads, “ Ducks have feathers to cover their butt quacks”.
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Camille
As an fellow abolitionist and anarchist who believes government is both harmful and in most cases unnecessary, it’s authority and power is derived from the threat of violence, reexamining the proper role of law enforcement (government) in society is essential to bring about effectual change. This is a fantastic, thought provoking take on how to start that conversation.
"We depend on each other, but only one of us carries a gun."
I wrote a story once about the idea of unbundling police actions, deputizing different people (unarmed) to carry out each function.