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Comment by bigbubba | Hacker News Reader

It sounds to me like goodells is relating their experiences.

> Presumably there would be some up front report and assessment of whether the person is exhibiting violent behavior.

That's a very presumptuous thing to presume, when the person who actually has personal experience with the matter says that dispatch is notorious for misevaluating situations (surely through no fault of their own much of the time, since dispatch is not on the scene and can only relay what they've been told.)

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If the EMTs are being paid $12, is it any wonder dispatch is notorious for misevaluating situations?

Deep structural problems.

I don't know what dispatch is paid, but EMTs are not dispatchers so this doesn't make much sense to me.

I don't follow. Why should EMTs getting ripped off be a factor in dispatch being unable to do more than relay whatever inaccurate or incomplete information they might gave been able to extract from a member of the general public over the phone? If a woman dials 911, says "Help!" then hangs up, how is the dispatcher supposed to accurately convey the situation to an EMT? EMTs should be paid more, but paying EMTs more won't address this problem.

Sorry, yes, I can see how my comment could be confusing.

I was implying that the call centre worker is probably less credentialed than the EMT.

Yours in a strong point though: dispatch can only pass on what they know, so their misevaluation may not actually be the result of mistakes or a pack of training, and I probably shouldn't have read that meaning in to OPs words.

Thank you.

Paramedics have more training and are paid more. While $12 is pretty low it’s not the ceiling.

It's just as presumptuous that every mentally ill person is carrying a firearm and is violent.

It only takes one to kill you? I think that's op's point.

But it isn’t a good point absent the bad assumption that the mentally ill are more dangerous. It only takes one bicyclist that’s fallen off his bike to kill you. So what?

It isn't just the aspect of someone being mentally ill, it's someone being mentally ill and that their behaviour caused the police to be contacted.

This is a symptom of people being to primed to believe that mentally ill people are dangerous, not a legitimate cause for concern.

Purple call the police on someone yelling. A mentally ill person yelling isn't a danger. They might be in crisis or pain, or they might be unable to effectively communicate.

A gun didn't help in any of those, the vast, vast majority of cases.

like that one time a white woman called the cops on a black man in central park?

I don't think doing an action to have the policed called on you is the best approach, considering it can be weaponized by dishonest actors.

Nobody in this discussion has presumed such a thing.

It's the explicit expressed fear in the root comment, and the basis of the police warrior ideology.

The root commenter has said explicitly of armed violent people: "the vast majority of patients are not like that"

So to reiterate, nobody in this thread has presumed as bluntfang claims.

Yet their claim is that we need to respond as though every mentally ill person is an imminent threat.

Their claim, as I've interpreted it, is that their lived experiences have lead them to believe any situation must be treated with caution because they never know what to expect. That is simply not the same as presuming that every mentally ill person is carrying a firearm and is violent.

As I see it, that's just common sense. If you get a call from a woman telling you she's fallen down and is hurt, how likely is it that EMTs are met at the door by a drunk man who claims nothing is wrong? What first appeared to be a simple medical situation may actually be a case of domestic violence. Neither the dispatcher nor the EMT can know this before anybody arrives on the scene, so whoever gets there first needs to be cognizant of all possibilities. Recognizing the possibility that somebody might be violent is not the same as believing they will be.

But I think you've made my point for me:

> As I see it, that's just common sense. If you get a call from a woman telling you she's fallen down and is hurt, how likely is it that EMTs are met at the door by a drunk man who claims nothing is wrong

This is

1. Exceedingly unlikely

2. A situation where escalating might be warranted, but the person who knocks on the door isn't in imminent danger.

3. You wouldn't bring a police officer to this call, but as you've so clearly pointed out, there's a chance it could turn violent. The logical conclusion here would be that police should respond to all medical emergencies, but they don't for reasons that become clear if you look into the history of how separate medical emergency response came to be.

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