911 Is a Joke in Your Town—for Real

For people of color, making an emergency call doesn't always result in a timely response.

Apr 25, 2014· 1 MIN READ

Culture and education editor Liz Dwyer has written about race, parenting, and social justice for several national publications. She was previously education editor at Good.

When there’s an emergency, you dial 911 and assume police, firefighters, or paramedics will arrive promptly. But what if they take their time coming to your aid? A full 24 years after the track “911 Is a Joke” topped the hip-hop charts, the slow first-responder arrival time that rap group Public Enemy rhymed about is in full effect—and the results are often fatal.

Last weekend two four-year-old half siblings in Far Rockaway, Queens, who were caught in a horrific house fire died from smoke inhalation. Although firefighters arrived within five minutes, paramedics took 21 minutes to get to the scene. "I personally think that lives could have been saved if EMS had got there earlier. They took too long to come," a neighbor, Ronda Clark, told the New York Daily News. "Even the firefighters were saying, 'Where's EMS? Where's EMS?'"

These slow response times are especially affecting communities of color. Because of the high level of segregation in our cities, responders generally know the racial and economic demographics of the residents of specific addresses before they even arrive at the scene. We’d all like to think police, firefighters, and paramedics wouldn’t rein in their sense of urgency because of race and class prejudices, but the evidence proves otherwise.

A recent analysis from the Chicago Sun-Times found that it takes the Windy City’s 911 call center three times as long to dispatch emergency responders to blacker, browner, and poorer South Side addresses than to locations in the city’s wealthier and whiter downtown and North Side neighborhoods.

Similarly, last year The New York Times detailed how in Detroit, the average 58-minute-long emergency response time has led to growing numbers of residents not even bothering to call 911. “If you have a heart attack, you’re dead,” hospital employee Frank Ponder told the Times. “There is no such thing around here as ‘in case of emergency.’ ”

Of course, given the prevalence of racial profiling by police, we know that emergency responders aren’t exactly avoiding communities of color. It shouldn't need to be said, but if responders are truly going to protect and serve, coming to the aid of people of color has to be a priority too.