Transcript: Don't Send the Police: Send Freedom House

Trymaine Lee: So how did it feel the first time you got behind the wheel and you're ready to take it out?

Rachel Gilmer: I think this has been something that, like I said, we've been working on. It's been an idea and a dream what would it look like to be building an alternative to policing in Miami. So when we got the van and got the decal on it and got behind the wheel, it felt like, wow.

Lee: Right.

GILMER: This has been a long time coming.

Lee: This is Rachel Gilmer, the Director of the Healing & Justice Center in Miami, Florida. We're driving around Liberty City, a historically black neighborhood in Miami, in the Freedom House Mobile Crisis response van, which is outfitted as an ambulance.

Gilmer: I remember I was at a community event and this little boy came up to me and he's like, "Are you the police?" I'm like, "No, but we're people you can call if you need help and you don't want to call the police." He was like, "Wow." He was really impressed. He's like, "That looks so official." So people have a really warm response when they learn about what we're doing.

Lee: And that's what it's about, right? Offering the community an option and a choice.

Gilmer: Yeah. People know 911 is an option. They know what they're going to get when they call 911. And we're out here trying to offer an alternative to that.

Leslie, left at the light, right? Seventeenth.

Lee: Rachel and other members of the Healing & Justice Center who work from this van are trying to build a new community response to mental health crises. Last year, they launched a pilot program that would dispatch a medic, mental health professional and person trained in violence de-escalation whenever someone called.

Studies have estimated that between 10 percent and 20 percent of all 911 calls are mental health-related and people with mental illnesses are more likely to be killed by police. Plus, we know that black people are more likely to be killed when police are called, period.

So when a black person who is suffering from a mental health crisis encounter the police often through 911, it can be disastrous.

Rachel and her team want those calls to come to them instead at 1-866-SAFEMIA.

The Healing & Justice Center was founded by the Dream Defenders, an activist group that's been operating for about a decade since the killing of Trayvon Martin. But the Freedom House Mobile Crisis response team is one of the newer programs to emerge, born out of the country's ongoing conversation around policing in America.

Archival Recording: I can't breathe! I can't breathe1 I can't breathe!

Archival Recording: (Inaudible) --

Archival Recording: George Floyd!

Archival Recording: (Inaudible) --

Archival Recording: George Floyd!

Lee: May 25th marks three years since police murdered George Floyd.

Archival Recording: No justice!

Archival Recording: No peace!

Archival Recording: No racist!

Archival Recording: Police!

Archival Recording: No justice!

Archival Recording: No peace!

Archival Recording: No racist!

Archival Recording: Police!

Lee: There were calls for accountability and justice.

Archival Recording: Tonight, cries of "Black Lives Matter" and "hands up, don't shoot."

Archival Recording: Hands up!

Archival Recording: Don't shoot!

Archival Recording: Echoing from coast to coast. The largest day of demonstrations for George Floyd yet.

Lee: There were also calls for action.

Archival Recording: With a mounting national chorus decrying police brutality against Black Americans, there is a new call for deep structural reform of policing across the country. Many are now demanding departments be defunded, dismantled or outright abolished.

Lee: And while the heightened passion of the moment, the hashtags and black squares, the renaming of buildings and schools, the pledges to tear down the system and build something new, the promises of a reckoning.

It may all seem distant, but for the people on the ground, people like Rachel and the Dream Defenders, they never stop plotting and planning and working because for black America, this conversation of what role the police should play in our communities is nothing new.

Roy Wilkins: We tend to overlook that area, that's so important. Police community relations, not the directors --

Lee: Here's Roy Wilkins, who was head of the NAACP in 1967.

Wilkins: The man-to-man relationship between the policemen and the people in the community that he deals with. And I think if we made an in-depth study, we'd find that a good many things stem from that relationship.

Lee: For generations and in the '50s and '60s in particular, black activists were exploring all the ways they might be able to dismantle police violence in their communities. In those early days, organizations like SNCC held sit-ins and resisted non-violently.

John Lewis: There was something deep down within me, moving me, that I could no longer be satisfied or go along with an evil system. I was sitting there demanding a God-given right.

Lee: While other groups, like the Black Panthers, armed themselves with law books in one hand and shotguns in the other and created patrols to keep an eye on police in their neighborhoods.

Archival Recording: Racist police agencies throughout the country are intensifying the terror, brutality, murder, and repression of black people.

Lee: And there were countless other lesser-known community groups doing the day-to-day work of the people. Groups like Freedom House in Pittsburgh.

Archival Recording: People would call for help and tell the police dispatcher, don't send the police, send Freedom House.

Lee: In 1968, 24 black men in Pittsburgh formed an experimental emergency response unit to help save the lives of black residents left behind by negligent policies and racist police. That group would become the basis for modern paramedicine in America.

Archival Recording: We brought the emergency room to the person and that eliminated the need to rush that person to the emergency room, because everything that they were going to do was already being done.

Lee: And it's the group that the Dream Defenders and Miami's Freedom House Mobile Crisis would eventually draw inspiration from.

Why did you all decide to adopt that name?

Gilmer: Dr. Armen told us about this program in Pennsylvania. And so it felt just right, really, in the spirit of self-determination, of communities coming together, doing what we need to do to keep our communities safe, doing what we need to do to meet the needs of our communities and that's very much in the same spirit of what we're trying to do here.

Lee: I'm Trymaine Lee and this is "Into America."

Today, part one of a two-part story on the decades-long quest for black Americans to fill the gaps left by police and the emergency medical system to save our bodies and our minds. This is the story of Freedom House, then and now.

John Moon is 74-years-old. He was born in Atlanta. And if you listen closely enough, you can still hear a bit of that Southern accent, even though he's been in Pittsburgh since he was a teenager.

John Moon: I have been in Pittsburgh since 1963. I've actually grown up in the Hill District of Pittsburgh.

Lee: That's one of the city's historically black neighborhoods.

Moon: I'm retired from the City of Pittsburgh Emergency Medical Services after 34 years. Prior to that, I was a paramedic at Freedom House Ambulance Service, which is the very first paramedic EMS system in the country.

Lee: Today, we take it all for granted. When there's an emergency, we call 911 and expect trained medical professionals to show up, provide emergency care and do what they can to keep us alive on the way to the hospital.

But before the late '60s, who exactly showed up and how well-trained they were depended on what county, city or even which neighborhood you lived in. In some areas, it was the fire department, but for others, it might actually be a mortician and a hearse.

But more likely than not, if you were having a medical emergency and called for help, it's the police who would show up. That was the case in the Hill District where John Moon grew up. And that wasn't necessarily a good thing, especially for black folks.

Moon: The residents in the Hill District, as well as the City of Pittsburgh, period, had to rely on the police to transport them to the emergency room in the event of an emergency. The mindset was, if I could get you there as soon as possible, that would make the difference as to whether you lived or died.

So it was more or less like a swoop and scoop type of mentality. So an example would be they'd come to your residence, put you in the back of a police wagon, and both officers would get up front. The problem with that is if something happened en route while you were back there, your heart stopped beating or you stopped breathing, you oftentimes worse off by the time you arrived at the emergency room than you were when they came to your residence to pick you up.

Lee: For black people, at any time in this country's history, but certainly during the '50s, '60s, '70s, I can only imagine how uncomfortable that would have been to have two officers, especially two white police officers, showing up to give you care. Was there like a mistrust, a distrust, a fear, concern with that set up?

Moon: Yes, you're absolutely correct. Unfortunately, during that time, the black community, in particular, the Hill District, had what I would call a very tenuous relationship with the police. During that time, they were predominantly white officers.

We have to remember there was no such thing as police accountability. So officers, unfortunately, were free to treat you or do whatever they chose and there was really no consequences for that.

Lee: You have police officers who may routinely be, like, brutalizing the community on one hand, and then you need some help, they're the same people that show up. But then there's the issue of training. Like, do they know how to treat people in an emergency medical situation?

Moon: Well, oftentimes it was, I would say, below basics. Officers that were assigned to wagons were the ones that perhaps were at the tail end of their careers. So as far as treatment was concerned, keep in mind that oftentimes the black community, there were stereotypes.

Examples would be if I came to your home and you were on the floor unconscious, for whatever the reason, it could obviously be medical, you were assumed to be drunk or under the influence of some type of drug until proven otherwise. So if I came in with that type of mentality, you're not going to get the necessary treatment that you would obviously need and that was the norm, unfortunately.

Lee: In a recent PBS documentary, Hill District residents described what it was like when someone needed help in their neighborhood.

Archival Recording: I found my mom laying on the floor. I picked her up, put her on the sofa, called the police. I informed them that she was not drunk, that she was sick. She didn't drink. And they said, well, it didn't matter. They weren't going to take her to the hospital. She died five days later from a cerebral hemorrhage.

Lee: So this was the medical system that Mr. Moon's working in as a young man in Pittsburgh.

Moon: I started my medical career as a hospital orderly. They don't call them that nowadays, but orderlies are, I would say at that time, one step up from housekeeping.

Lee: Then, one day at work, something amazing happened and it would shake John Moon's idea of what a medical professional could actually look like.

Moon: I happened to be in a room preparing a patient to be transported that was being discharged. And two black guys came in with afros and beards. And when they walked in, they commanded the presence of that room.

Lee: These two brothers were razor sharp. Dressed in clean white uniforms. These brothers meant business.

Moon: They didn't walk in hooping and hollering, yelling, OK. Just their mere presence commanded respect. And I was in awe of these two guys and I just kept watching them. I kept watching them prepare this patient to move from the bed to the stretcher and the professionalism in which they conducted themselves.

Lee: Mr. Moon learned that these men were from a place called Freedom House.

Moon: And I was so in awe of them, I said, "That's what I got to do."

Lee: Freedom House was founded in the late '60s to serve Pittsburgh's majority black Hill District and do what the government wouldn't. They had all sorts of things, like a food bank, job training and voter registration drives. But the founder of Freedom House, James McCoy, Jr. was always looking for new ways to help the community.

Moon: Once it was discovered that the residents of the Hill lacked medical care, something as simple as being transported to the emergency room where you perhaps had to get a relative or someone to transport you there, barring the police, something had to be done.

Lee: This was the mid-60s and researchers had recently found that an American soldier shot in Vietnam had a higher survival rate than a civilian shot in the U.S. They believed that one of the culprits was a lack of timely emergency care on the way to the hospital. So doctors started talking seriously about the need for a high-quality medical transport system. And one of the leaders of this movement happened to be in Pittsburgh.

Moon: A gentleman by the name of Peter Safar, who was desperately trying to get not only Pittsburgh, but the country to see that it's not how fast you get them to the emergency room that's important, it's what's being done for them before you get them there.

Lee: Dr. Peter Safar was an Austrian anesthesiologist who was considered the pioneer of modern CPR.

Moon: He did a lot of experiments with breathing for individuals and CPR, but he had trouble getting that concept out into the general public.

Lee: The men at Freedom House heard about Dr. Safar's mission and wanted his help.

Moon: So now you got guys that are coming to him saying, we got this problem in our community and we're looking for a way to solve it. And he said, well, I got the perfect idea. I can train these individuals on how to provide the care that I wanted to put out into the world and we could get it out there.

And the individuals from Freedom House said, OK, we'll buy into that, but we have one unnegotiable entity. Every person that you train has to be black because you're serving that community. So he agreed to that.

Lee: Dr. Safar created what is now considered to be the first paramedic course in the country. And his students from Freedom House would be among the first paramedic students in America.

Moon: So Freedom House, they went up and down the streets, taking individuals that perhaps were marginally employed, unemployed, perhaps some that may even had trouble in school. And you take these individuals, 25 of them. You get these people. You put them into training, roughly about 300 hours, which consisted of time in the operating room, intensive care units, in the emergency rooms, even going to the morgue to study anatomy and physiology. And you trained them to the highest standards possible. So essentially, you took the emergency room out of the hospital and put it into the streets.

Lee: Freedom House launched their paramedic service in 1968. But because emergency dispatchers didn't route calls to them, Freedom House bought a police scanner to listen for emergencies in their area on their own. That first year, they responded to nearly 6,000 calls and are credited with saving some 200 lives

In the process, they've revolutionized medical transport and developed many of the standards we see today.

Moon: Even the design of the vehicle. That seat in the back of an ambulance that sits at the patient's head, Freedom House was very instrumental in designing that component. The onboard oxygen, the onboard suction unit.

Lee: And a few years later was when Mr. Moon saw those two men from Freedom House in afros, beards and crisp white uniforms take charge in the hospital room where he was working as an orderly. And right then and there, he decided that's what he wanted to do.

Moon: So I left the hospital and found out where Freedom House's offices were located. Went there. And in my mind, I'm saying, hey, I'm a hospital orderly. I move patients. I transport them from here to there. I insert Foley catheters in the individuals. What more can I not be trained for?

Lee: But it wasn't that simple.

Moon: Walked into the office and said, I'm here to apply for a job. And the gentleman said, "OK. If I showed you a picture of the heart, would you be able to diagram the circulatory system?" "No." He said, "OK. If I showed you a picture of the lungs, would you be able to label the respiratory components?" "No." He said, "OK, you're not qualified to work here."

So I left there dejected and that little voice in the back of my head kept telling me, OK, John, this is what you wanted to do. It's up to you to find out how to make it happen.

Lee: So Mr. Moon went to the yellow pages and found the number for a local fire academy that was offering an emergency medicine course.

Moon: And I signed up, went there 13 weeks, twice a week, at the end of the course passed the necessary test, got my certificate, went back to Freedom House and got hired on the spot. They sent me from the offices of Freedom House directly to the uniform store, so I could get the same white uniforms that those guys wore when they came into that office.

I'll put it this way. I can compare it to winning the lottery.

Lee: When we come back, John Moon on his time with Freedom House.

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Lee: John Moon joined Freedom House in 1972 and hit the ground running.

Moon: You're talking to the very first person who ever did what we call a tracheal intubation outside of the hospital in the field.

Lee: Today, it's common for paramedics to intubate patients who can't breathe on their own to make sure they're still taking in oxygen on the way to the hospital. But that wasn't the case in the early '70s.

But Dr. Peter Safar wanted to teach this life-saving procedure to Freedom House paramedics, starting with Mr. Moon.

Moon: So my training consisted of, I went into an operating room with the chief anesthesiologist, Dr. Peter Safar. And it was amazing, because the minute we opened that door, everything stopped. It was total silence in that room. And that's all you saw, it was just he and I. And the reason that was such a state of suspicion is that the only time you would see a person look like me coming into an operating room was with a mop or a bucket.

And we walked right over to a patient's head and he made the anesthesiologist get up out of the chair. And he said, "You sit down and intubate that patient."

Lee: And describe what you did in terms of the actual intubation. Describe what you did.

Moon: Well, actually, what you do is get what we call a laryngoscope, which is a curved blade. It has a light on the tip of it. And once you place that blade into the patient's mouth, you move the tongue to the left side and tilt the head and you can actually see two things. You can see the esophagus and/or the trachea.

And as you lift up a little more, the trachea will come into full view. So you simply slide this tube right into the patient's trachea, which in turn allows you to be able to put air in that individual's lungs and assist the breathing.

Little did I know, less than a week later, I would take that same procedure out from the hospital, out into the field, into a person's home and performing that procedure on an actual patient.

Lee: What happened with that situation in the home? Talk to us about what happened there.

Moon: Well, initially, we got a call for a gentleman that was unconscious. We arrived at his residence and he was lying on the floor. And once we assessed him, he was breathing, but it wasn't adequate. At that time, we were still designing everything.

So we had a medical director and her name was Dr. Nancy Caroline. So I contacted her on the radio and she said, intubate that patient. At the time, she told me, even though I had performed it in the operating room, I had no idea that I was going to do it out in the field.

So when she said do it, I thought she had lost her mind. So I went head on and did it and transported the patient to the emergency room. Now, in the perfect world, the ER staff would be glad to see that. But they were not accustomed to paramedics coming in with a patient already intubated.

Lee: And black paramedics. And you guys coming in --

Moon: And a black paramedic. You're absolutely right, because no one else in this country were ever doing that. Nobody. So when I arrived in the emergency room, I was challenged by the doctor as to who did it, who told you to do it.

"My name is John Moon and I worked for Freedom House Ambulance Service."

Lee: So what were those early days like for you brothers out there in the neighborhood? What were you all doing?

Moon: The calls themselves primarily were mundane calls. Your heart attacks, your strokes, shootings, you name it.

Lee: It's kind of everyday stuff that happens in any community across this country. But for a community that had been denied quality access to care, that must have meant everything for the people you all were serving.

Moon: Oh, it did. People would call for help and tell the police dispatcher, "Don't send the police. Send Freedom House."

So the community itself got accustomed to having help come to them that looked exactly like them.

Lee: By 1972, Freedom House employed 35 crew members and responded to 7,000 calls a year. They began to carry NARCAN, the drug that can stop an overdose, and were the first people to use it outside of a hospital setting.

That year, doctors in Pittsburgh performed a two-month survey of ambulance services and found that Freedom House provided appropriate care, 89% of the time. The police, meanwhile, gave the wrong care, 62% of the time. And by now, Freedom House was starting to catch the attention of people outside the Hill District.

Moon: On this particular instance, there was a call in an affluent neighborhood in the part of the city for a kid that was struck by a port authority bus. And the police arrived on the scene because that was their job in that area and they didn't know what to do.

The officer gets on the radio and he says, "Send Freedom House." And the dispatcher told him, "I can't do that because it's not their district." The police responded, "Well, you better send somebody out here that knows what the hell they're doing."

Fortunately for us, we were monitoring the call and we dispatched ourselves on the call, treated the child, saving his life and transporting him to the hospital. That's one of the many calls that resonate with me.

Those are the good ones. We had our battles with the police also, too.

Lee: Tell us about one of those moments. I mean, certainly things can get sticky sometimes. You guys are out there trying to save lives. You have police who may or may not want to do what they're doing or to see you there. Talk to us about some of those run-ins, what that looked like.

Moon: Well, there were times when, say for example, someone is in an automobile accident, actual call that I was on. We arrive on the scene and the police is there pulling the person and the car is all smashed up. And the steering wheel is bent and the police is pulling the guy out of the car.

Our first response is, "No, wait!" So you have this white guy with a gun, and a badge, and a baton turns around and tells me, get the eff away from here or I'll lock your BA up.

And from that point in time, that's all you can do because here's this guy with a gun and a nightstick or whatever the case is, you have to kind of relinquish responsibilities to them. It's interesting because we obviously were a threat to the police and we obviously were a threat really to the city government, because they really didn't have any control over Freedom House because it is a private entity. And in order to gain control, you either got to remove them or create your own, which is essentially what they did.

Lee: And what's worse in America than a black man you can't control? That's the most dangerous. Get the National Guard. Get the dogs. We got a problem here.

Moon: Yes. You're absolutely correct and that's, unfortunately, was the norm at that particular time. And we had to step back and allow that opportunity to run its course.

Lee: Even in service, even when you're providing a service that saves lives, that racial dynamic and that power dynamic still existed.

Moon: Absolutely. Yes, it was. You're absolutely correct.

Lee: So ultimately, what happened, you think that this would be a heralded moment in history, all of the advancements, there should be statues to you guys in Pittsburgh and elsewhere. Why did Freedom House end up closing down? What happened?

Moon: As I look back at that time, I can sum it up as if right now we were a victim of our own success. By that, I simply mean the things that we were doing only the residents of the Hill District were receiving that type of care. So you have your affluent white communities or communities outside of the Hill District saying, wow, those poor people welfare recipients over there in that neighborhood are getting better care than I am. So they voiced their concerns from a political standpoint to the mayor. And unfortunately, the mayor had to, I would say, bow to his constituents.

Lee: The mayor co-opted the model that Freedom House had pioneered and created a city-wide, government-funded EMS system that essentially dealt a death blow to Freedom House, which would be forced to close down for good in 1975.

The city-wide system hired predominantly white EMTs with less experience than Freedom House. A deal was reached to bring the Freedom House paramedics into the new system, but many were forced out or left soon after. Mr. Moon almost joined them.

Moon: I wasn't allowed to do anything. I couldn't drive the vehicle. I couldn't examine patients. I couldn't talk on the radio. I was essentially the third person, more or less an observer. And it was designed to kind of frustrate me into a situation where I would just say, you all got this.

Lee: But before Mr. Moon had a chance to resign, he answered a call that changed his mind.

Moon: The person was not breathing and their heart was not beating. And the crew that I was working with didn't know what to do. They didn't have a clue. So they looked around and looked at the person that wasn't allowed to do anything and said, you take over.

So I started assigning duties and responsibilities to each of the other crew members and we subsequently saved this individual's life. I decided, OK, John, you see what you're dealing with. You see the lack of experience and things, so you're going to have to step up your game.

So I became more aggressive as far as treating patients. I became more vocal as far as examining individuals and discussing their medical problems with them and things like that. So in doing so, I made sure that everybody knew who John Moon was.

Lee: John Moon dedicated the rest of his career to helping Pittsburghers and along the way, moving up through the ranks and later designed the first diversity recruitment program for the department.

Moon: Pittsburgh EMS is 48-years-old this month. And we just swore in the first African-American chief of the department.

Lee: Wow.

Moon: Black female and she's someone that I hired personally 25 years ago.

Archival Recording: Thank you so much for joining us here on this historic day as we formally swear in the new chief of the Pittsburgh Bureau of EMS.

Lee: On May 5th, Amera Gilchrist, a mentee of Mr. Moon's, became the first black person and first woman to hold a position as EMS chief in Pittsburgh.

Amera Gilchrist: I, Amera Gilchrist --

Archival Recording: Do solemnly swear --

Gilchrist: -- do solemnly swear --

Archival Recording: -- that I will support --

Gilchrist: I will support --

Archival Recording: -- obey --

Gilchrist: -- obey --

Archival Recording: -- and defend the Constitution --

Gilchrist: -- and defend the Constitution --

Archival Recording: -- of the United States --

Gilchrist: -- of the United States --

Archival Recording: -- that as chief.

Gilchrist: -- that as chief.

Archival Recording: Yeah. I will well and faithfully discharge --

Gilchrist: I will well and faithfully discharge --

Archival Recording: -- and perform --

Gilchrist: -- and perform all the duties of my office.

Archival Recording: Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the new chief of EMS for the City of Pittsburgh, Chief Gilchrist.

Moon: So none of the struggles and the problems and hurdles and barriers that we all had overcome at Freedom House as I look at what's happening now, it wasn't in vain.

Lee: And the legacy of Freedom House reverberates far beyond Pittsburgh. In 1975, the Federal Transportation Department determined that Freedom House's training program and equipment setup be the national standard for ambulance services. That standard has been adopted by 40 states.

Other groups are also using their "For Us, By Us" model of emergency care, like the People's Community Medics in Oakland, California, who train civilians how to save lives when the ambulance takes too long to get to black neighborhoods.

And of course, there's the Freedom House Mobile Crisis Unit in Miami. The group responding to mental health calls to reduce the number of black people in distress killed by police.

I'm speaking with you from Miami where a whole new generation is taking up the mantle and the spirit of Freedom House. And I wonder how that feels for you knowing that the back history, the struggles, how it was forced out of existence, now you're standing up and making sure that the history is not lost and now to see a new generation taking up that mantle, how does it feel?

Moon: It makes my heart smile because it's something that is coming through fruition. We weathered setbacks and disappointments and broken promises to create an EMS system that's emulated today across this country. So when something like that comes to the forefront, I'm overjoyed.

Lee: Next week, we'll bring you the story of Miami's Freedom House and how they're carrying on Mr. Moon's legacy to show up and care for their people.

Gilmer: When people see our flyer that says, 1-866 SAFEMIA, so that when people are in crisis, they know who they can call to get for help. And they know that it'll be somebody who's going to come with a smiling face and be supportive.

Lee: Follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook using the handle @intoamericapod or you can tweet me, @TrymaineLee, my full name. And if you love this show, help spread the word. You can do that by rating and reviewing “Into America” on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening right now.

“Into America” is produced by Isabel Angell, Allison Bailey, Mike Brown, Aaron Dalton, and Max Jacobs. Original music is by Hannis Brown. Our Executive Producer is Aisha Turner.

A special thank you to Kevin Hazzard, author of "American Sirens: The Incredible Story Of The Black Men Who Became America’s First Paramedics."

I’m Trymaine Lee. We’ll be back next Thursday with part two of our story on Freedom House.