Unfair by Adam Benforado Read Free Book Online

certainly exacerbated by the fact that the responders did not make independent assessments of David. If they had each come across him separately and attempted to determine the cause of his condition, they might well have reached different conclusions, and that could have led them to discover the head injury much more quickly.The lack of independent assessment is puzzling because police departments, with all their experience conducting eyewitness interviews, are well aware that when one person, for whatever reason, makes public his observations and conclusions very early on in the process, others feel pressured to conform.This is why when, say, six people witness a bank robbery, detectives usually elicit statements and conduct lineups with each one individually.
    In the end, it’s hard not to ask the “what if” questions in David’s case. What if the criminals had used a knife instead of a pipe? What if David had been carrying his ID? What if his wife had gone looking for him and had been there when the ambulance arrived, or met the hospital staff at Howard? What if thePritchetts had driven David to the hospital and then conveyed their observations directly to the triage nurse?
    All of these things might have radically altered the course of events the night David was attacked, but they didn’t happen—and it doesn’t just come down to bad luck. The errors were predictable and preventable. That fact makes David Rosenbaum’s death especially tragic, but it also offers a glimmer of hope—one that David’s family seized upon.They decided to offer the District of Columbia a deal: they would drop their lawsuit against the city if it created a task force to reform the Department of Fire and Emergency Medical Services to help prevent similar tragedies in the future.A number of these reforms, like ensuring that both EMTs and firefighters are fully prepared to carry out medical protocols and that they are held accountable for their performance, can help future responders avoid the critical mistakes that were made in David’s case. But we need to go further to get at the root of the problem: preventing damaging labels from taking hold in the first place.
    When we know that extraneous elements can lead to harmful labels, we should consider intervening to counteract them. Controlling the influence of disgust, for example, may be as simple as providing first responders with menthol salve to put under their noses to neutralize the smell of vomit, feces, or a dead body. We also need to take action when we know that victims with particular personal characteristics—the elderly, minorities, homeless people, addicts—tend to be devalued and receive substandard treatment.We could start by introducing more empathy training designed to get police officers, EMTs, and ER nurses to see members of these groups—who are overrepresented in 911 calls—as human beings worthy of compassion and careful treatment.
    Perhaps most important, responders should conduct their own blind assessments of victims—whether that involves giving a cognitive evaluation, searching the crime scene, or conducting a forensic test. Data (“His eyes are not dilating properly, and hispulse is abnormal”) should be shared; labels (“He’s a drunk”) should not.
    Treating someone based on a label—such as ETOH—should always be a last resort. When we act upon a single label, we almost always lose vital nuance. With the power failing and the floodwaters rising as Hurricane Katrina made landfall, the medical chairman at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans had to make an evacuation plan.He used a shortcut to help sort the patients: those who possessed do-not-resuscitate orders would be given lowest priority in leaving the hospital.In that panicked moment, the choice seemed justifiable—as he explained later, these folks seemed to have the “least to lose”—but, in retrospect, using that label as a sorting mechanism was a grave mistake.It did not help