By now you've seen the viral videos of the Chicago Fire Department interactions with a violent citizen that ended in the Firefighters using forcible entry tools to stop an attack.
As soon as the video starts with the CPD Officer holding her Taser which has already been deployed I knew exactly how this was going to end.
For years municipalities have been sending fire engines and ambulances to mental health crisis and the results haven't exactly been promising. It turns out that sending a hammer to adjust a timing belt doesn't work well. The Emergency Room isn't the place for folks who are a danger to themselves or others and we on the Fire and EMS side are so under trained it's laughable.
De-escalation failed in this case, that's why the taser was deployed. Why Fire an EMS was ever called in the first place is part of what I wanted to address after we cover the elephant in the room:
Was the CFD member out of line for striking a violent patient with a forcible entry tool?
No.
What else is he supposed to do?
Now that that's out of the way, let's discuss why CFD is there at all:
Response times.
The City gets a call that a man near a church is talking to himself. Send the Fire Department, obviously. After all if we send anyone else it could take an hour for someone with experience handling mental health issues to arrive, if at all.
So instead of addressing the issue at hand and choosing a proper tool we send the closest, quickest thing and get surprised when it doesn't go as planned because the tools they have are different.
CFD is catching a ton of heat from the community about this and I understand why. It's easy to make comments from the keyboard when you aren't being threatened. I've been hit, kicked, pushed, bitten, spit on, vomited on, urinated on and I've had to physically defend myself using whatever I could reach at the time. I'm not trained to deal with this situation. None of us are. This isn't a medical emergency.
But we're expected to respond and remove the issue from the public view.
Well, Chicago, he's no longer in public view.
What else did you expect?
Comments