Police are worse than useless. They are actively harmful. We just had a medical emergency with one of our encampment residents. She was flat on the ground, stuporous, with severe decerebrate posturing and breathing normally.
The cops radioed it in as an overdose (which means EMS will take forever to respond), even though there were no signs of OD. To make things worse, the 911 dispatcher confirmed to me that the cops had given them the complete wrong address in their call.
Even worse, I was the only one on scene carrying Naloxone. The cops made everything worse and were not even prepared for an overdose. The cops asked me several times if I could administer Narcan; I had to correct them repeatedly and tell them there were no overdose symptoms and that the woman had a recent history of aneurysm. They stood their and did nothing, and were afraid to even touch her.
NEVER assume that police have made a proper emergency call. Always call 911 yourself. Carry Narcan.
@chadloder Unbelievable the utter lack of any medical training the police have too. That itself is criminal.
@darwinwoodka @chadloder Your police just gets nearly no training (an average of 19 weeks with a large junk of time for shooting), which I think is one of the most important issues of the police in the US. Here in Germany, a normal police officer gets a minimum 2 to 3 years of training (depending on their career and their state), which includes a training in First Aid, before they are allowd to do anything. If they want to special jobs (like Criminal Police), they get of course extra training.
@elshid @darwinwoodka @chadloder
Noah Smith just wrote a piece about this on his substack. I think most Americans are largely ignorant of how badly trained our police are compared to our economic peer countries in Europe. I certainly was.