Emergency in Portland? You're on your own.
Public safety in Portland has become a real hit-or-miss proposition, mostly miss. You first noticed it three years ago, when in the middle of the George Floyd-sparked riots, the cops started quitting rather than be held accountable for their actions.
Then the cops who remained on the force started quiet-quitting, gleefully informing members of the public at every turn that they couldn't help because they're understaffed. Can you say "passive-aggressive"? Even the police chief, Chuck Love L, has gotten into this. Every time he speaks, he's quick to tell you he doesn't have enough cops to do all the things a police department is set up to do. Despite an all-time record budget. That guy makes Barney Fife look like Kojak.
Before too long, the police non-emergency phone line became the police non-answered phone line. The citizenry soon learned that if they called that number, they wouldn't be speaking to anyone for at least a half hour, and usually much longer. Mostly they gave up even trying to call.
The riots are ancient history, but the inability to get a cop when you need one has only gotten worse. These days even 911 isn't being answered for long stretches, eight minutes, 10 minutes, timeframes that are the difference between life and death.
And now, to cap it all off, even when you get through to 911, if you need an ambulance, there may not be one available. It's a private company that runs that service, under a contract with Multnomah County, and they say they can't find enough workers to run the ambulances. So sometimes you just die because there's no way to get to the hospital.
What in the ever-loving name of God is going on here?
Well, just look who's in charge. The county chair, Jessica Chevy-Vega, has announced that she's going to fine the ambulance company whenever they don't show up on time. How is that going to help? If they can't find qualified employees, maybe they should raise their salary scale to attract some. And money that's being paid as fines to the county won't be available to do that. Not to mention the fact that the fines will probably be passed on to the poor patients or their insurance, anyway.
Maybe the whole model is wrong. Maybe it shouldn't be a private company. In Portland, before the ambulance gets there, the last time I checked, the fire department shows up. So you get a fire truck for sure, and maybe an ambulance too. It seems like duplication. Maybe ambulance service should be a purely government function.
Another model that might work is to treat the ambulance company as a regulated utility, sort of like the electric and gas companies. Let them make a profit, and even make the profit relatively predictable, but cap it. And regulate their operations heavily. If they don't perform the way they're supposed to, tighten up on the cap.
Just brainstorming here. I'm no expert on these things. But sadly, neither are most of the folks on the county commission. Portland, the Land of Taxes, can't even get you an ambulance when you need one. What a terrible excuse for local government we have here.
Good way to drive business people away is having big brother telling them how to run their business.
ReplyDeleteIt shouldn’t be a business.
Delete"It shouldn't be a business."
DeleteBingo. This is more of the Larsonian "private business can do it better and cheaper" nonsense we've been buying since Reagan. Let's put the R back in PF&R and bring it back in-house. There's no reason this service shouldn't be run by the fire bureau.
While we're here, it's time for PF&R to renegotiate their relationship with the care facilities within its jurisdiction.
Even if .gov takes over ambulance services, it does not guarantee they can get enough staff. The emergency rooms look pretty darn full these days. I wonder what is going on with all these emergencies, likes kids getting heart attacks while playing sports.
DeleteSurprised we don't have an Uber-like surge-pricing model for ambulance rides. That would be the logical next step in keeping Portland weird.
ReplyDeleteUse street response for overdoses then fee up ambulances for the rest of the community.
ReplyDeleteor stop responding at all cause that seems to be the long-term plan to get rid of the useless eaters.
DeleteLook at the twitter account that shows the daily calls for fentanyl or other drug overdoses. The people who are actively trying to kill themselves with drugs are taking all the calls for service.
ReplyDeleteAdd in the fact that the vast majority of ambulance calls can be handled with one paramedic and an EMT and we're regulating ourselves into an artificially created shortage
We should be using our magical Street Response people for overdoses to administer Narcan, then let AMR serve the folks who are trying not to kill themselves
I’ve been saying this for a few years now. On top of the clownish, dystopian policies foisted on them, The police have used the “defund the police” rhetoric as an excuse to completely disregard their responsibility to do their jobs. They are actively, from the top down acting like Petulant children and without actually saying it loud, screaming “SEE! SEE what happens when you don’t think you need us? How do you like it now?!” It’s more of a RICO type extortion racket for protection at this point. They’re shaking down an entire city rather than just the mom and pop shop on the block. They can clearly be considered a gang in blue now more than ever. The idea being, if you don’t back us up completely, let us have our extra rights-the ones that distinguish ourselves from the peons we police, let us investigate ourselves, let us avoid meaningful civilian oversight, and stop questioning our motives because all police are above reproach…if we aren’t given our bag of cash with no strings then there’s no telling what might happen. Who knows? It’d be a tragedy if your little city accidentally burned down, if thousands of violent criminals weren’t arrested, or even investigated thoroughly, left to continue to victimize the rest of the citizens.
ReplyDeleteThey’re using the egregious incompetence on display politically, compounded with the bruising of their egos by the defund the police clowns, to essentially extort the entire city, creating such a dangerous, dysfunctional environment that we come crawling back to them, begging them to help fix the situation and giving them free reign and fat wallets to do it.
I know you’ve heard of Mike Schmidt. I wonder why you don’t mention him as part of the problem.
DeleteThey ain't dumb.
ReplyDeleteObviously we should be using mass transit for these emergency room visits. It just takes a little foresight people.
ReplyDeleteSave the planet!
Related: The 911 operators' union is… the Portland Police Association. They left AFSCME in 2019.
ReplyDeleteBig part of the problem is local hospitals divert AMR to other locations further away. What should we expect when AMR cannot drop a patient off at the closest hospital and need to drive to the opposite end of the county? The hospitals are partially to blame for AMR response times. The failures are systemic and not isolated to AMR.
ReplyDeletePortland has 1.2 cops per 1,000 residents. The average for a City of Portland's size is 2.6 per 1,000. When you need to double the number of cops to get to the average -- and that assumes Portland has "average" law enforcement problems -- you're going to have unanswered calls and triaged responses that may not come for hours.
ReplyDeleteThis isn't the fault of AMR - they're the industry leading ambulance provider and have billions of dollars in public contracts. In fact, Washington County recently dumped locally owned Metro West in favor of the mega corporate conglomerate, and AMR last year fired LA county for medical transport. Having only a slight bit of knowledge on this topic myself, Metro West was basically the worst around - and the real struggle AMR has is that they need to send TWO Paramedics. This is only a requirement in the Multnomah County circus - everywhere else in Oregon does 1 paramedic, 1 EMT. Quoting Willamette Week: https://www.wweek.com/news/courts/2023/05/08/multnomah-county-ambulances-are-arriving-to-emergencies-later-and-later/ "A temporary change to our staffing model to paramedic/EMT, which is the Oregon standard used by all counties surrounding Multnomah, would mitigate the impacts of these shortages," the AMR spokesperson added.
ReplyDeleteSo, this whole thing could be fixed, no problem, real quick, if Multnomah County wasn't a bunch of dimwits. Little bit of "deregulation", shocker.
Forget it Jack, this is china town.