Police Department EMS

[Medic One]

I work as an unarmed Paramedic for a Police Department in the EMS division.

Any other services around in US and other countries that use PD based Paramedics?

We provide ALS coverage to our municipality working side by side with the towns BLS Volunteer Ambulance.

We work in fly cars and/or staff the ambulances for the volunteer service depending on staffing.

We also have the opportunity to train as Rescue divers on Marine Division, and also have a Non-Motorized Bike Team.

I would like to chat with others in my similar situation as a Medic working for a Police Department.

[fiznat]

Probably not exactly the same, but one of the towns where I moonlight as a medic has a volunteer department that is under the purview of the local police department. The chief of the agency is a paid police officer who wears a police uniform and carries a sidearm (don't know why), EMS is dispatched by the police and the organization is part of the police budget. The volunteers (and paid medics) aren't considered police officers by any means, though, and the day-to-day operations are pretty much the same as anywhere else.

It sounds like yours is a fairly rare and interesting setup. Are you considered a police officer? Can you function as a law officer at times? Can you arrest (or write psych committal paperwork) for your own patients? How does your relationship to the police department affect your work as a paramedic?

[Medic One]

We are in the exact same situation as you described. We are not PD but fall under their command.

[HERBIE1]

We have a couple municipalities around here that are "Public Safety", which means they are police, fire and EMS. Not sure how all of it works, but they've been doing it for years.

It must be a very odd situation.

[Dustdevil]

We have a couple municipalities around here that are "Public Safety", which means they are police, fire and EMS. Not sure how all of it works, but they've been doing it for years.

That has been my involvement in police EMS. It usually boils down to a force of cops doing fire and EMS as an afterthought, with very little emphasis on it, much like most fire-based EMS. The only real positive to it is that cops are generally much more mentally and intellectually suited to medicine than the typical hosemonkey. While this results in a better quality of practitioner, it is still held back by police work being their primary interest and career path.

I have no experience with the civilian staffed police EMS, but Fort Worth, Texas actually tried it briefly in the late 1960s. Seems like a lot of stuff that fails miserably down here becomes suddenly popular up north about 20 years later, lol.

I worked one semi-rural county-wide EMS where the crews were mixed. Each medic was officially employed by the hospital, but the salaries and costs were paid by the county. There was one medic per truck, and he was a deputy sheriff, but did not work patrol, unless it was a special detail or overtime shift. We did not wear SO uniforms on the ambulance. We kind of wore whatever we wanted actually. Usually scrubs or a flight suit. But we were almost always carrying a concealed firearm. And we made nearly twice as much as the patrol deputies.

The second crewmember would be which ever ICU nurse could get to the ambulance first when the call came in. Some of them were EMTs also, but usually not. None of us medics (I was not a nurse yet) ever missed not having an EMT with us. The nurses were much better to have along in most every case.

That was my favourite EMS job ever.

Edited May 5, 2011 by Dustdevil

[Richard B the EMT]

Nassau County (NY) Police Department runs an ALS EMS. The Paramedics are civilian PD employees (with brown, not blue, uniforms), and are mission specific. They drive themselves to a call scene, enter, and start evals and treatments, joined onscene by an NCPD LEO, who assists, and eventually drives the ambulance from the scene to the hospital. If it's a one man PD cruiser, the cruiser is left at the scene, and the ambulance eventually returns the LEO to it, otherwise, the LEO's partner picks him (her) up at the hospital.

FYI, other Nassau County towns with their own Police Departments do similar.

[croaker260]

There are a few LE agencies out there with EMS divisions.

There are also a number of LEO (Sheriff mostly) ran ALS services with duo-role officers in the northern Mid west that have run successfully for years, as well as a few in california. Most of these guys do not consider themselves "public safety" oficers because they mostly do not do fire supression at all. The most common thing they have in common is that they serve very rural and very vast areas co-responding in a (typically) fly car set up with BLS agencies. Many of them also perform SAR duties as well but that is more common for sheriff agencies than you might think.

While my experiance with them is very limited,the few medics I have encountered in SAR courses (back in the day when I did tech rescue) were very motivated and gung ho about medicine and SAR, and prefered the LEO culture to the typical EMS culture and Fire Culture they had in their area...

The one draw back is that they tend not to have the extensve ties with the medical community that more traditional EMS's do.

Again , I am speaking in generallities here.

Anyway, that aside, there have been a surpising number of LEO based systems , we just never hear about them because for the most part they run in different circles than we do culturally and educationally. All in all, we generally dont hear crappy things about them in the news like some of our own brethern.

While not the same thing, also remember that Boston EMS started out in the Boston PD, and are still represented (quite successfully) by the Boston Patrollmans Association (union) against the IAFF and the BFD.

Also , one of the first civilian air medical services to run paramedics is the Maryland State Police Air medical system, wich got its start with the help/guidence/hardheadedness of the father of trauma medicine, R Adams Cowley himself! It still runs today, and I think they have something like 6 helicopters/bases.