Firefighters and paramedics in the nation’s capital say they’re increasingly becoming targets of abuse and assault while on duty.
Emergency Medical Service (EMS) personnel are becoming the victims of deliberate violence, even as they respond to calls for aid. The attacks are reducing morale and affecting the ability of personnel to perform tasks. A direct cause remains unknown, but the D.C. Fire and EMS Department has begun tracking the details of these incidents.
Firefighter paramedic Myisha Richards was dispatched to a respiratory distress call at a Southwest D.C. apartment, but the scene quickly became dangerous. A domestic violence situation escalated between the victim, the woman’s sister, and a male in the apartment.
“When something like that happens, I’m not going to stay around if it’s a violent situation,” Richards said. “Me and my partner backed out of the apartment. We get on the steps, and then both of the girls came out. One girl spit on me, she spit on my face, and that was that. They started jumping me.”
Richards was beaten for over two minutes, including having her face stomped, while her partner struggled to defend himself and assist her. She suffered multiple injuries including a concussion, swelling, a bleeding nose and lip, and handfuls of hair ripped from her head. She required stitches above her eye and was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
When questioned by police, one attacker stated they chose to assault Richards because they were “unhappy” with the services provided by Richards and her partner.
The assault occurred July 31, 2020, and is just one of numerous incidents that define a new type of danger facing EMS personnel. Across D.C., reports of attacks on on-duty firefighters and paramedics have dramatically increased. No longer a rare occurrence, departments and senior fire officers across the nations have begun discussing how best to handle the issue.
“Across the United States, what we have found… is that departments nationwide, us included, have not done a good job of tracking how often this is occurring,” Shawn Downs, Deputy Fire Chief of Health and Safety for the D.C. Fire Department said. “In my personal opinion, we are still in the infancy of everything we’re working toward.”
As the head of his department’s Health and Safety branch, Downs oversees all projects and initiatives related to the physical and mental wellbeing of the department’s personnel. Downs, along with fire officers from across the nation, is asynchronously developing a system to monitor and track attacks on firefighters and EMS personnel. The system infrastructure and details are being workshopped by representatives of fire departments from D.C., Arlington, San Diego, Washington state, and others. Personnel are able to access an electronic registry to catalogue and report incidents from any department computer. If personnel are deployed on a call, QR codes placed on vehicles and personal equipment can be scanned by phones.
On November 10, the District of Columbia’s registry system went live. Within its first week, eight attacks, six involving physical violence, were registered.
Downs hopes the data will be used to construct an incident map for D.C., similar to the Metropolitan Police Department’s crime card website, and eventually the nation.
EMS personnel are no stranger to seeing violence, they are often the first to arrive on the scene of car accidents and shootings, but the issue of violence intentionally targeting them is often ignored. There is scant hard data on the subject to inform developing policies across America, and few organizations or academics have devoted resources to tracking the issue. However, the anecdotal evidence across numerous departments paints a worrying picture.
There have always been cases of random violence – such as interaction with mental health patients or those under the influence of drugs – but now attacks are becoming so frequent that police assistance is often called.
“When I came up… there wasn’t much violence, not against first responders,” D.C. Fire and EMS Battalion Chief Eric Bowers said. “We have a code where we can call for immediate police assistance. It was rare when I was coming up, but now it seems commonplace.”
The request for emergency police assistance in the District of Columbia is referred to as a 10-33. When a 10-33 is called on the radio, law enforcement in the area move to immediately assist unless already responding to emergencies. While historically rare, it’s not uncommon for MPD to respond to 10-33 requests multiple times a day in the modern era.
Deciding how to effectively, and appropriately, equip EMS personnel to better protect themselves has become a subject of debate. The standard policy for EMS personnel in D.C. is to immediately leave the area if they believe the scene is unsafe, and not engage or escalate the situation. Unfortunately, that’s not always possible.
“We’re supposed to take the punches, get spat on, get abused, hit, whatever, and we’re not supposed to do anything back. We’re supposed to just leave it alone and retreat,” Richards said. “Sometimes that’s impossible. Not to mention, we’re human.”
On April 25, firefighters arrived at a vehicle collision near Florida Avenue and North Capitol Street. As responders assessed patients, one man assaulted the fire lieutenant in charge. Several firefighters responded by hitting the man and forcing him to the ground. A video showing the firefighters attacking the man, but not the man’s initial assault on the lieutenant, was released by an observer and resulted in six firefighters being placed on administrative leave and assault charges being brought. All personnel returned to duty and all charges were later dropped.
According to the FIRST Center at Drexel University, there were 350 “media-covered” assaults of on-duty firefighters in 2021. The following year it was 593, a 70 percent increase. This data shows a notable rise; however, these are only the incidents reported by the media. Every firefighter, EMT, and fire officer interviewed for this story was confident news outlets were underreporting the issue.
“People didn’t really acknowledge it as an issue because people weren’t tracking it,” D.C. firefighter union President David Hoagland said when asked why assaults on EMS personnel were not reported more frequently. “If it bleeds it leads type deal, right? It’s a good question. I myself have been trying to get an answer about that as well.”
To many of the interviewed personnel, the only coverage they knew of was the April 25 attack and Richards’ assault. The lack of representation is disheartening to the entire department, affecting some personnel as much as the attacks themselves.
“It was never on the news about my coworker getting carjacked at gunpoint. It was never on the news about my coworker who was helping a shooting victim,” Richards said. “The people that shot [the victim] circled back around and [my coworker] got grazed by a bullet. None of that stuff was reported on the news.”
The attack on Myisha Richards went unreported by news outlets for nearly three years.
Whether journalists are choosing to cover the issue more or there are simply more attacks to cover is unknown at this time, but all EMS personnel interviewed recounted numerous examples of violence not reported by local news.
Downs cited a recent incident in which an armed man held firefighters at gunpoint in the Penn Quarter before forcing them into their fire station.
Hoagland recounted instances where ambulances were vandalized or stolen from EMS personnel, sometimes with personnel still inside.
“We’ve had it happen where the patient gets violent in the back and they climb up to the front and try to get in and drive away,” Hoagland said. “Last week… they were inside working on a patient, somebody walked up to the ambulance, got in it, and drove away.”
Arlington’s fire department is also grappling with the issue of rising violence and is collaborating with D.C. to develop its own tracking system. Arlington’s Fire Chief, David Povlitz, provided multiple examples of EMTs being attacked while alone with patients and unable to request assistance. In one case, a patient who overdosed on Fentanyl was resuscitated and immediately assaulted the attending paramedic. In another case, a patient being transported to a hospital suddenly became aggressive.
“[They] asked the person treating them in the back of the ambulance what their position was on the Israeli-Hamas conflict. Whatever the response was, which was noncommittal, wasn’t the right answer for them,” Povlitz said. “They produced a screwdriver and started to threaten them. We don’t know what the trigger is. I think it does correlate with more of a general collective mental health and behavior of society.”
The Fire and EMS Fund released an article in late 2021 offering possible solutions to reduce assaults on first responders and EMS workers. The suggestions included increased training on non-violent de-escalation, arming first responders, and increasing penalties for parties who assault personnel. Some departments, such as in Ohio and Florida, began arming “tactical medics” as early as 2019, but not every department supports such a policy.
“We would shun any offensive weapons, measures, or equipment the police would need to have,” Povlitz said. “We’re not law enforcement. We don’t want to be law enforcement.”
Povlitz plans to release Arlington’s own violence tracking registry within the next two months. Depending on their findings, the Arlington Fire Department will consider solutions ranging from automatically requesting a police escort prior to arrival at known high-risk locations, to issuing body armor to all personnel.
Departments in the DMV area and beyond are updating policies and searching for new ways to ensure the safety of their personnel, but Richard believes that’s not where the fault lies. She believes the onus is on cities like D.C. to do more to punish offenders and hold people responsible.
Despite an initial charge of assault with a deadly weapon, both of the women who beat Richards had their charges dropped and were not prosecuted.
“The [district attorney] told me himself when he called me that they were not going to be picking up those charges,” Richards said. “They need to start convicting people of these crimes.”
The man arrested for assaulting firefighters on April 25 also had all charges against him dropped by the district attorney’s office. Multiple individuals in the D.C. Fire and EMS service echoed Richards’ belief that prosecutors were intentionally choosing not to prosecute, instead viewing the attacks on responders as “part of the job.”
Richards and other EMS personnel want more accountability and legislative protection. She recently testified in a House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing on violence in D.C., but isn’t hopeful that there will be meaningful change. Like many first responders, she feels undervalued, vulnerable, and disheartened. The general public’s increased hostility toward people like her coupled with the neglect from journalists and policymakers feels like a betrayal.
“For me and most of my coworkers, we signed up with the reality that we might die in a fire. I knew that. I knew that I might die saving someone,” Richards said. “We’re there to help. To abuse us, assault us, or even shoot at us is absurd. Eventually, you’re not going to have any help. People don’t want to do this shit anymore.”