Police/BERT to Collaborate on Transporting Wounded Persons

There was public outcry after Pinks Alley resident, Michael Usher was shot and left for dead on the sidewalk on Flamboyant Street, until an ambulance arrived to take him to the hospital. Residents of the area who showed up at the scene condemned the police for leaving the critically wounded victim there. Commissioner of Police, Chester Williams told the media that it is a catch twenty-two where the police take the heat whether they do or do not move the victim for medical assistance. He explained the rationale behind not taking patients to the hospital, as well as a new policy that is needed going forward between the police department and emergency responders on how to manage these types of situations where people’s lives hang in the balance.

 

Chester Williams, Commissioner of Police

“There are two schools of thought when it comes to police transporting injured persons to the hospital from a crime scene. One school of thought is that the police should not do that because transporting a critically injured person requires that the person must be undergoing some medical treatment along the way to the hospital. The other one is that the police should do so in cases where the ambulance is going to take a long time to reach. And if the incident is not too far from the hospital, then the police should be able to transport the injured person. We have had instances where we would transport the person or persons to hospital, where it’s a long distance and the ambulance would take a very long time to come, and the ambulance and the police would then meet along the way and then the police would transfer the injured person to the ambulance and then the ambulance carries the person forward. My thing is we’re damned if you do and damn if you don’t. If the police had picked up the young man and taken him to the hospital and he died along the way, then you’d have heard that the police caused his death still, so there’s nothing that we could have done that would have avoided us from getting the blame. I think that there is a need for us to do a more comprehensive research and then perhaps Let’s join with the EMT personnel and see how we can develop a more reasonable policy, because the truth is whenever we transport injured persons to the hospital, we take a flogging from the EMT personnel. They’re saying that we should not, and to some extent I would want to agree with them, and to some extent, I would not want to agree with them. But there is a need for us to develop a policy that is going to be reasonable, and I think the policy should be that in situations where the person is extremely, injured and the hospital is nearby, then we should take that person. In cases where the person is injured and the hospital is quite a distance away, then we can transport the person and then we meet up with the ambulance along the way and transfer that injured person to the ambulance for them to be able to take the person to the rest of the way to the hospital. So just give us some time to sit down and reason out this issue and I’m sure that we’re going to come up with a more reasonable solution to be able to meet, in the event that there is any future occurrence, that we’ll be able to deal with in a more different manner.”