Twice, I’ve had to call 911 for people having a health crisis, and once I was on the scene with an accident victim as other people around us called for help. I naively expected, when calling, that health professionals would be sent to the scene. 1/16

The 1st time I don’t know who arrived. It was in the early ‘90s and there was a man collapsed near the World Trade Center who was blue in the face. There was a crowd around him and bystanders were tending to him but I didn’t know if anyone had called an ambulance 2/16

Pre-cell phone, I had to run blocks to a pay phone to call 911 just in case. Despite the fact that I told the operator that I was blocks away and couldn’t say what was happening at the moment, we had to go through 911’s script about the patient’s age and current status 3/16

The operator seemed amazed I couldn’t give an eyewitness description or guesstimate the patient’s age even though I emphasized from the start that I had to leave the scene to make the call 4/16

Years later, on a bitterly cold night, I was in a cab when I saw a naked man trying to dig up a sidewalk tree with his hands. Clearly he was in mental distress like #DanielPrude Again, I had no way to know if anyone had called an ambulance but I now had a cell phone 5/16

So I called 911, making it clear I was no longer on the scene, and got some peculiar questions (“Are you the patient?”) and a LOT of attitude as I blogged about here. https://www.wendybrandes.com/blog/2009/02/keep-your-pants-on/ 6/16

Again I had no way of knowing if 911 sent an ambulance, cop car, or fire truck. I just assumed it would be an ambulance because there was no crime or fire, but a mental-health crisis. 7/16

Then there was the night in 2006 when I was on the scene when a motorcycle collided with a bus. https://www.wendybrandes.com/blog/2011/09/10-years-later-essential-acts-of-witness/ While I sat with the fatally injured biker in the street, a crowd gathered and numerous helpful people called 911. 8/16

It was hugely annoying as everyone shouted out obvious instructions (“don’t move him” - um, I wasn’t) because there had apparently been no improvement of 911 since 9/11 when operators initially treated every call about the WTC as something new, rigidly sticking to script 9/16

I thought that 5 years later there would be a way to let people know that previous calls had been made and reassure them that help was on the way. Apparently not. I stayed with the young man until a fire engine arrived. 10/16

I’ve got nothing against firefighters because they do know first aid and are indeed New York’s #Bravest - unlike cops who use the excuse of fear to shoot first, ask questions later. Firefighters run into burning buildings. They don’t stand there and shoot them. #acab 11/16

Respect to firefighters! Still, I thought, “Why a fire engine? Why not an ambulance?” as I wandered, dazed, from the scene. (You can read about what actions I took after I learned the victim died here https://www.wendybrandes.com/blog/2011/09/10-years-later-essential-acts-of-witness/ ) 12/16

Anyway, in all three health-related 911-call instances I expected EMTs to show up first, and as we see from my experience in 2006 and this year’s #DanielPrude case, that is not always the case. And clearly, out of all possibilities, the cops are the worst option #fuck12 13/16

The NYPD costs NYC $11 billion a year. #DefundThePolice doesn’t mean money disappears. It means the police stop doing jobs that have nothing to do with crime and we #reallocate funding to, among other things, health services https://www.instagram.com/p/CEf8cmxD-vg/?igshid=19conbndg7xs3 14/16

Trust me, the day you need an ambulance for a physical crisis, you will want an AMBULANCE, trained EMTs, oxygen and all the other life-saving equipment, not cops with guns. If it’s a mental emergency, you’ll want people with mental health training. https://gothamist.com/news/nyc-experiments-routing-911-calls-mental-health-experts 15/16

Cops with guns are not a health care solution so they shouldn’t be called for health emergencies. They shouldn’t hog the budget for health emergencies. We should spend that money on specially trained experts. (And appropriate retraining for 911 operators.) 16/16