mishafletcher: [image id: a series of tweets by twitter user jamie ford.image 1: Defund the po
mishafletcher: [image id: a series of tweets by twitter user jamie ford.image 1: Defund the police? Here’s an example that you’re benefiting from right now. 1/9 [photo: a group of people, mostly black men, standing in front of an ambulance. two men are holding children; many of the men are wearing what appear to be either EMT or police uniforms.]image 2: Until the 70s, ambulance services were generally run by local police and fire departments. There was no law requiring medical training beyond basic first-aid and in many cases the assignment of ambulance duty was used as a form of punishment. 2/9 image 3: As you can imagine, throwing people with medical emergencies into the back of a paddy wagon produced less than spectacular health outcomes. Now imagine how much worse it became when disgruntled white police officers were demoted to ambulance duty in black neighborhoods. 3/9 [photo: a late-50s ford panel truck that’s been restored to look like a police van. it says ‘paddy wagon’ in large letters on the side panel, and the doors have ‘to serve and protect’ and a seal that says ‘city police’ on them.]image 4: The response was so problematic that in 1967, black leaders in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, created Freedom House Ambulance Services and approached Peter Safar, a doctor at the University of Pittsburgh, who had lost his 12-year-old daughter to an acute asthma crisis. 4/9 [photo: a group of people, a mix of genders and races. some of the men appear to be medical professionals and have stethoscopes hanging around their necks; the rest of the group is wearing a spectrum of clothing that ranges from nice casual to business suits.]image 5: With a shared purpose of improving emergency medical response, Safar trained 25 black men from that neglected community––many of whom did not have a high school diploma––as emergency medical technicians, skilled in this new thing called CPR. 5/9 [photo: an ambulance with its back doors open. two black men are dressed as EMTs and are providing what looks like CPR to someone on a stretcher. the man doing the chest compressions is looking straight ahead, meeting the eyes of the three white women and one black woman are watching him. the women are well dressed and look concerned.]image 6: With two donated police vehicles, Freedom House Ambulance Services began to save lives at such a rate, that they became the gold standard for emergency response training in the US and the model for EMTs we now take for granted in every community. 6/9 [photo one: two black men and one white man in the back of an ambulance. photo two: a black man and a white woman inside a freedom house ambulance, seemingly caring for someone on a stretcher.]image 7: Freedom House paramedics were so dynamic in their ability to respond to the critically ill that the Pittsburgh police often called them for high acuity cases in white neighborhoods. 7/9 [photo: two black men wearing shirts with ‘ambulance attendant trainee’ badges on their sleeves and a black woman with a stethoscope are gathered around a white woman on a hospital bed. one of the men is holding what looks like an oxygen mask; the woman looks like she might be taking the patient’s blood pressure]image 8: Despite the success of FHAS, police and fire departments resisted retraining their personnel, so the city reallocated funds to create a separate EMT service. (A new mayor cut funding to Freedom House in 1975 and seized their assets, but that’s another story). 8/9 [photo: a white man (possibly peter flaherty, mayor of pittsburgh from 1970 to 1977) wearing a suit, his hand on his head.]image 9: When people think defunding the police will lead to anarchy, they’re not understanding that change rarely happens from within, and that resources reallocated to community-based services can not only improve neglected neighborhoods, but create innovations that help us all. 9/9 [photo: a timeline from ems.gov of the progression of ems systems in the united states]the last tweet in the thread, which isn’t included in this post, reads ‘Here’s a trailer for a documentary about Freedom House Ambulance Service. #KnowYourHistory’ [link to video] -- source link
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