Coordination with Law Enforcement and Other Fire Service Agencies

As mentioned above, LAPD had considerable difficulties organizing its own response Wednesday night, let alone responding to requests from other agencies. For example, a plan for deploying the many police officers massed at the yard had not been developed or implemented by 1 1:00 PM that night. Confusion, untrained personnel, and the failure of high-ranking officers present to take charge resulted in an inability to give direction to the hundreds of officers present. These problems considerably delayed the EMS response. Other field command posts did better, but were left to function on their own during the entire disturbance on a decentralized and uncoordinated basis (Webster, 1992). EMTs were asked how well their activities were coordinated with law enforcement and other fire service responders. Table 17 reports this data. The Los Angeles County Fire Department elected to not participate in this portion of the questionnaire. The fire service received the highest evaluation, with 76% believing that they did a "good" or "fair" job of coordination (this is to be expected since most respondents are from the fire service). Law enforcement, in general, received a highly positive rating, with 76% saying that coordination with them was either "good" or "fair." Further analysis reveals that most of the praise goes to the California Highway Patrol who provided most of the EMT protection on Thursday (EMSA survey). The County Sheriff was also praised for his support. Private ambulance company respondents tended to split their response equally between either a high or low rating for each group. The survey asked respondents about what percentage of the time law enforcement was dispatched with them at particular locations to provide protection. Those being dispatched by the county or city dispatch center reported that this was the case 61 % of the time; directly from a staging area, 77 % of the time; and from a private company 60% of the time. Without knowing how many of these dispatches actually needed protection it is difficult to interpret the data. The availability of law enforcement officers for protection on Wednesday indicates that it was a problem then. Even if an EMS unit was dispatched without protection, it was often possible to call for it at the scene according to 71 % of the survey respondents. On the other hand chances of actually getting it was another thing: 42% always got it; 27% sometimes; and 30% infrequently received it.

Medical Care for the Injured

Continue to Care and Feeding of Emergency Medical Technicians

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