In the late 1960s, out of Pittsburgh’s Hill District, a radical idea was born: an emergency service that trained and equipped community residents to respond to medical and distress calls rather than police. This idea became Freedom House, the nation’s first paramedicine program. The program was primarily comprised of Black men and women from the Hill District, a Black neighborhood facing economic crisis during the 1960s.
Freedom House was a radical idea that changed emergency response programs and birthed modern-day paramedicine. As we continue to reimagine public safety and confront the role of police in our society, Freedom House’s legacy offers a blueprint on what health and safety can look like when people experiencing medical or behavioral distress are met with appropriate care. On this episode Justice Above All, host Dr. Ayobami Laniyonu, Non-Resident Senior Research Fellow at TMI, unpacks what we can learn from Freedom House’s rise to prominence and its ultimate demise.
Guests:
Freedom House didn’t just function as transportation to the emergency room, it operated as an emergency room. Featuring interviews with the original Freedom House staffers, this documentary from WQED Pittsburgh documents the rise and fall of Freedom House Ambulance.
They were running calls when nobody else was running calls — when the word paramedic did not exist. When the nation did not realize that you needed to treat people immediately or that you could treat people effectively immediately where they fell. They were out there, they were doing it, and they were quite literally writing the textbook that generations of people, myself included, were trained on.
Freedom House shows us that the answers to our problems are rooted in our communities. The leaders at Freedom House understood how impactful it is to comprehend the intersection of public safety and public health. At this intersection, they addressed the needs of impoverished communities with empathy, care, and dignity. Instead of armed individuals showing up and maybe escalating a medical crisis, they created a scenario where people in need are met with highly-trained professionals whose sole focus is to administer life saving interventions.
Our nation is at an inflection point with its struggle to keep our communities safe. We must consider an alternative to the current system and advance a plan for effective, equitable and humane public safety structures, and Freedom House offers us one model of what alternative solutions can look like. TMI and Dr. Laniyonu are engaged in praxis-oriented research that builds on Freedom House’s innovative model. This model provides an alternative to law enforcement as first responders to medical emergencies which promotes effective, equitable and humane public safety structures.
