Paramedic: EMS Acted as Agents of Police in Tyre Nichols' Death
The EMTs who responded to Tyre Nichols' death were fired.
Two emergency medical technicians (EMTs) and an emergency vehicle driver who responded to the brutal police beating of Tyre Nichols were fired after an investigation found they failed to provide adequate medical care.
“Our investigation has concluded that the two EMT's responded based on the initial nature of the call (person pepper sprayed) and information they were told on the scene and failed to conduct an adequate patient assessment of Mr. Nichols,” the fire department said in a statement.
The Fire Department in Memphis is the largest Emergency Medical Service (EMS) in the state of Tennessee. Public safety is often thought of as a stool with three legs: police, fire, and EMS. These three professions are inherently connected and share similiar cultures, values, and beliefs. America is in the middle of a deep reckoning with the job of policing, but what about EMS? They don’t get as much attention or scrutiny.
In the case of Tyre Nichols’ killing, what did the EMTs do wrong? Why were they fired? What role did they play in Nichols’ injuries turning fatal?
For this post, I interviewed Claire Zagorski, a harm reductionist, trained paramedic and PhD student at the University of Texas. We talked about the overlapping cultures between police and EMS, and how the duties of providing emergency care can be distorted and subsumed by policing.
“This isn’t the first time EMS has behaved as agents of the police," Zagorski told me.
We tend to think of emergency medical workers primarily as health care workers. Their job is to rush to a scene and save lives. But their work is inherently tangled up with the job of policing, a tension that raises important questions about the imperatives of “public health” being overridden by “public safety.” Bbefore getting to Claire’s interview, it’s important to understand the timeline of the Nichols’ killing, which sheds light on the profound medical neglect on display by the police who beat him and the EMTs who were supposed to care for him.
This timeline contains painful, upsetting, and graphic details of Tyre Nichols’ death.
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