Metacomet
29th February 2012, 02:19
I think this is the right forum for this, just an article from a local paper from a few weeks ago I wanted to share.
April 25, 2009: outside of the IMF/World Bank meeting in Washington, DC, police with batons are attacking a group of protesters. Above a roar of chaos and confusion, one activist screams in pain: stomped by a cop, he's suffering from an excruciating break just below the knee.A trained EMS team is standing 20 feet away, but the police aren't letting any medical workers through. The injured demonstrator's only resource is a team of street medics — fellow radicals, armed with basic first-aid knowledge. In all-black outfits with red duct-tape crosses on their sleeves, they quickly surround the guy and hustle to construct a makeshift splint.
Anarchistic, high-energy, and self- organized, street medics have been part of activist counterculture since the 1960s, with major presences at civil-rights protests, anti–Vietnam War actions, the American Indian Movement's occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973, anti-globalization protests in the 1990s and early aughts, and most recently, at Occupy encampments internationally. Street medics also take their skills to disaster areas: there were medics in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and in Haiti after the earthquake.
Some medics have formal EMS training, but most are just trained by other medics. In typical "fuck the system, let's build our own world" punk fashion, they reject the necessity of legal medical licensing. Instead, over the decades, they've amassed their own set of traditions and protocols, their own collectives and conferences.
Ask any street medic, and they'll tell you their free, direct-action health care is protected by Good Samaritan laws — laws designed to deflect liability from bystanders who respond to emergencies. But it's unclear whether those laws apply to medics, who go into protests specifically prepared to give medical care.
"Street medics, when they're marked as street medics, are generally expected to be tactically neutral," says "Errico," a 23-year-old street medic who lives in an Allston collective (like several medics we spoke to, Errico asked that we not use his real name). "We tend to discourage people who are wearing street-medic insignia from, for example, throwing bricks at cops . . . but we are in no way politically neutral. Medics exist to further the movement."
Read more: http://thephoenix.com/boston/news/133998-anarchistic-and-self-trained-are-street-medics-th/#ixzz1njWw9I00
April 25, 2009: outside of the IMF/World Bank meeting in Washington, DC, police with batons are attacking a group of protesters. Above a roar of chaos and confusion, one activist screams in pain: stomped by a cop, he's suffering from an excruciating break just below the knee.A trained EMS team is standing 20 feet away, but the police aren't letting any medical workers through. The injured demonstrator's only resource is a team of street medics — fellow radicals, armed with basic first-aid knowledge. In all-black outfits with red duct-tape crosses on their sleeves, they quickly surround the guy and hustle to construct a makeshift splint.
Anarchistic, high-energy, and self- organized, street medics have been part of activist counterculture since the 1960s, with major presences at civil-rights protests, anti–Vietnam War actions, the American Indian Movement's occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973, anti-globalization protests in the 1990s and early aughts, and most recently, at Occupy encampments internationally. Street medics also take their skills to disaster areas: there were medics in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and in Haiti after the earthquake.
Some medics have formal EMS training, but most are just trained by other medics. In typical "fuck the system, let's build our own world" punk fashion, they reject the necessity of legal medical licensing. Instead, over the decades, they've amassed their own set of traditions and protocols, their own collectives and conferences.
Ask any street medic, and they'll tell you their free, direct-action health care is protected by Good Samaritan laws — laws designed to deflect liability from bystanders who respond to emergencies. But it's unclear whether those laws apply to medics, who go into protests specifically prepared to give medical care.
"Street medics, when they're marked as street medics, are generally expected to be tactically neutral," says "Errico," a 23-year-old street medic who lives in an Allston collective (like several medics we spoke to, Errico asked that we not use his real name). "We tend to discourage people who are wearing street-medic insignia from, for example, throwing bricks at cops . . . but we are in no way politically neutral. Medics exist to further the movement."
Read more: http://thephoenix.com/boston/news/133998-anarchistic-and-self-trained-are-street-medics-th/#ixzz1njWw9I00