 DR. WHO? Although what they do is legal in Massachusetts, many street medics insist on hiding their identity, in case their work puts them at odds with the police. |
Anarchistic, high-energy, and self- organized, street medics have been part of activist counterculture since the 1960s, with major presences at civil-rights protests, anti–Vietnam War actions, the American Indian Movement's occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973, anti-globalization protests in the 1990s and early aughts, and most recently, at Occupy encampments internationally. Street medics also take their skills to disaster areas: there were medics in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and in Haiti after the earthquake.
Some medics have formal EMS training, but most are just trained by other medics. In typical "fuck the system, let's build our own world" punk fashion, they reject the necessity of legal medical licensing. Instead, over the decades, they've amassed their own set of traditions and protocols, their own collectives and conferences.
Ask any street medic, and they'll tell you their free, direct-action health care is protected by Good Samaritan laws — laws designed to deflect liability from bystanders who respond to emergencies. But it's unclear whether those laws apply to medics, who go into protests specifically prepared to give medical care.
"Street medics, when they're marked as street medics, are generally expected to be tactically neutral," says "Errico," a 23-year-old street medic who lives in an Allston collective (like several medics we spoke to, Errico asked that we not use his real name). "We tend to discourage people who are wearing street-medic insignia from, for example, throwing bricks at cops . . . but we are in no way politically neutral. Medics exist to further the movement."
 FROM SELMA TO SOUTH STATION The street-medic effort has its roots in the civil-rights activism of the 1960s, but many feel that the Occupy protests have taken the work to a new level of popularity — and have attracted professional medical workers to the movement. |
RADICAL ROOTSThe first street medics organized in 1964, during the civil-rights movement, as part of the Medical Presence Project — a working group of the Medical Committee for Human Rights. MCHR was made up of physicians, mostly white and Northern, who organized to provide medical care for activists and volunteers working in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer. (Often, segregated hospitals would deny care to injured protesters).
Members of the Medical Presence Project were doctors, registered nurses, and medical students, who specifically showed up whenever there was an expectation of violence being used against civil-rights activists. Initially, they wore white lab coats as they ran side by side with protesters.
By 1968, as activism radicalized, some members of MPP grew disillusioned by its "elitism," and shifted their goals to making medical training more accessible to non-doctors. They started offering 20-hour, two-day courses to learn the basic first aid needed to help protesters at demos.
Ann Hirschman, a nurse practitioner, was there. Now 65 and living in New Jersey, she's been a street medic since 1965, working during the civil-rights and 1970s anti-war movements, and at Wounded Knee in '73.
"In '67, I had just graduated nursing school. I was going to demonstrations and noticed that there weren't enough [medical] professionals to go around," says Hirschman. "We figured out fairly early that we had to recruit people from around us to help. . . . There were not yet paramedics, there were not yet EMTs. This was the 1960s. So we made up a first-aid course that was very specific to demonstrations. . . . We literally created street medics."
Another central figure of the street-medic movement was Ron "Doc" Rosen, an activist who got his start as a member of the MCHR during the march on Selma, Alabama, in 1965. Eventually Rosen helped to start the first street-medic collective, based in Manhattan. The group regularly met at Rosen's Kung Fu studio on Broome Street; they coined the term "street medic."
Later in his life, Rosen moved to Colorado, where he helped establish the Colorado Street Medics collective in Denver.
His street-medic work through the 1970s and 1980s slowed down — as did radical activism in general during those decades. But Rosen helped pump life back into the street-medic movement in 1999, when he trained groups of new medics before and during Seattle's anti-globalization World Trade Organization protests. Over the next few years, thousands of street medics around the country started to once again regularly hold 20-hour trainings.
FIRST AID
Errico leads such trainings often. Originally from Seattle, Errico has been a medic since high school, when he started going to demonstrations. "I got interested in the understanding that one of the ways for us to defend ourselves against the police was to treat the injuries they could inflict on us," he says.
He estimates that during a training, eight hours are spent learning how to give first aid for various injuries; how police weapons are deployed; how to treat pepper spray, tear gas, head injuries, and broken bones. Another six hours are spent on tactics and how to deploy skills in the street, and on psychological after-care. The remaining four hours or so are spent on scenarios simulating street situations.
Errico says he has used his medic skills at eco-defense campaigns in the Midwest and Northwest, and at Earth First campaigns all over the country. He has also worked in disaster relief — a week after the disaster in Haiti, he boarded a plane to Port-au-Prince with the Mutual Aid Disaster Relief Collective, a national street-medic organization.
But his heart is with activism.
Ann Hirschman, a nurse practitioner, was there. Now 65 and living in New Jersey, she's been a street medic since 1965, working during the civil-rights and 1970s anti-war movements, and at Wounded Knee in '73.
"In '67, I had just graduated nursing school. I was going to demonstrations and noticed that there weren't enough [medical] professionals to go around," says Hirschman. "We figured out fairly early that we had to recruit people from around us to help. . . . There were not yet paramedics, there were not yet EMTs. This was the 1960s. So we made up a first-aid course that was very specific to demonstrations. . . . We literally created street medics."
Another central figure of the street-medic movement was Ron "Doc" Rosen, an activist who got his start as a member of the MCHR during the march on Selma, Alabama, in 1965. Eventually Rosen helped to start the first street-medic collective, based in Manhattan. The group regularly met at Rosen's Kung Fu studio on Broome Street; they coined the term "street medic."
Later in his life, Rosen moved to Colorado, where he helped establish the Colorado Street Medics collective in Denver.
His street-medic work through the 1970s and 1980s slowed down — as did radical activism in general during those decades. But Rosen helped pump life back into the street-medic movement in 1999, when he trained groups of new medics before and during Seattle's anti-globalization World Trade Organization protests. Over the next few years, thousands of street medics around the country started to once again regularly hold 20-hour trainings.
FIRST AID
Errico leads such trainings often. Originally from Seattle, Errico has been a medic since high school, when he started going to demonstrations. "I got interested in the understanding that one of the ways for us to defend ourselves against the police was to treat the injuries they could inflict on us," he says.
He estimates that during a training, eight hours are spent learning how to give first aid for various injuries; how police weapons are deployed; how to treat pepper spray, tear gas, head injuries, and broken bones. Another six hours are spent on tactics and how to deploy skills in the street, and on psychological after-care. The remaining four hours or so are spent on scenarios simulating street situations.
Errico says he has used his medic skills at eco-defense campaigns in the Midwest and Northwest, and at Earth First campaigns all over the country. He has also worked in disaster relief — a week after the disaster in Haiti, he boarded a plane to Port-au-Prince with the Mutual Aid Disaster Relief Collective, a national street-medic organization.
But his heart is with activism.
Read more: http://thephoenix.com/boston/news/133998-anarchistic-and-self-trained-are-street-medics-th/#ixzz1mtBg3GH9
Anarchistic and self-trained, are street medics the future of first aid?
"I really hate the cops," he says. "That is actually a really large driving motivation for me, is that I really hate the cops and frequently find myself in positions of direct and/or violent conflict with them. And being able to neutralize some of their force or make it so that me and my friends and my comrades can go hard against the cops and know we can take care of each other when shit goes bad is a very strong motivation. On a broader scale, I'm working for the abolition of capitalism and overthrowing the government . . . and using my street-medic work as a help to that."
"These are skills that should be taught in school, should be taught to kids,"says "Charlotte," another Allston-based medic, who has a master's degree from Cornell in international agricultural development and has worked in sub-Saharan Africa with the UN World Food Program. "They're really easy things that make your life a lot better, and they shouldn't be reserved for some elite group of people who are able to access all of these trainings and then don white coats and uniforms and create this separation."
But to an extent, street medics are putting on uniforms. They wear red-cross insignia and distinguish themselves from other protesters, holding themselves out as a medical resource. So do Good Samaritan laws apply to them? Depends who you ask.
STREET LEGALGood Samaritan laws exist to protect civilians who spontaneously attempt to help others who appear to be helplessly in danger. For example, if you're giving CPR to a stranger whose car accident you happened to witness, you can do so without worrying that they'll sue you if you accidentally crack a rib doing chest compressions.
Vickie Sutton, a professor at Texas Tech University School of Law, is the author of the book The Good Samaritan Laws and director of the Good Samaritan Law Project. She says that, with these laws, there may be different standards for volunteers who are training themselves and marking themselves as medics, than laws pertaining to bystanders and random civilians.
"If you're calling yourself a street medic, you have more of a duty to be prepared and trained," says Sutton. "You're more likely to incur liability for gross negligence because you probably have more of a duty to have education if you hold yourself as a street medic."
Plus, she says, the laws vary from state to state.
"Say a street medic from Massachusetts goes to Connecticut," she says. "They're subject to a whole new set of laws. When you have volunteers that come from a distance to help at a protest, all of these people are going to be completely unaware of laws in a new state."
So street medics could be exposing themselves to lawsuits if they mess up. But at least as far as the Boston Police are concerned, what medics are doing is not actually illegal. "Self-appointed medics would be subject to the same laws and expectations as the general public during the course of a police incident," says Elaine Driscoll, the BPD's spokeswoman.
"These are skills that should be taught in school, should be taught to kids,"says "Charlotte," another Allston-based medic, who has a master's degree from Cornell in international agricultural development and has worked in sub-Saharan Africa with the UN World Food Program. "They're really easy things that make your life a lot better, and they shouldn't be reserved for some elite group of people who are able to access all of these trainings and then don white coats and uniforms and create this separation."
But to an extent, street medics are putting on uniforms. They wear red-cross insignia and distinguish themselves from other protesters, holding themselves out as a medical resource. So do Good Samaritan laws apply to them? Depends who you ask.
 "The Occupy Movement has brought street medics into an unprecedented spotlight." |
Vickie Sutton, a professor at Texas Tech University School of Law, is the author of the book The Good Samaritan Laws and director of the Good Samaritan Law Project. She says that, with these laws, there may be different standards for volunteers who are training themselves and marking themselves as medics, than laws pertaining to bystanders and random civilians.
"If you're calling yourself a street medic, you have more of a duty to be prepared and trained," says Sutton. "You're more likely to incur liability for gross negligence because you probably have more of a duty to have education if you hold yourself as a street medic."
Plus, she says, the laws vary from state to state.
"Say a street medic from Massachusetts goes to Connecticut," she says. "They're subject to a whole new set of laws. When you have volunteers that come from a distance to help at a protest, all of these people are going to be completely unaware of laws in a new state."
So street medics could be exposing themselves to lawsuits if they mess up. But at least as far as the Boston Police are concerned, what medics are doing is not actually illegal. "Self-appointed medics would be subject to the same laws and expectations as the general public during the course of a police incident," says Elaine Driscoll, the BPD's spokeswoman.
Read more: http://thephoenix.com/boston/news/133998-anarchistic-and-self-trained-are-street-medics-th/#ixzz1mtBWQvEb
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