On April 4, 2025, my best friend had a medical incident, including passing out and hitting her head. She’s fine now, but we did need to get her to the hospital for treatment. She couldn’t stand on her own power, and Public Safety (PS) can’t touch people in that situation, so we called an ambulance.
When we finally get the ambulance, it’s not just the two of us and the two paramedics. Because this happened on-campus in one of the dorm buildings, the Resident Advisor (RA) on-call had to be there to take an incident report (IR), as did a PS officer. We got lucky that, in this particular situation, only one PS officer showed up – in the past for similar incidents, we’ve sometimes had as many as three at once.
My friend was not lucid enough to be handling a lot of the details herself, so gave consent for me to handle stuff like telling the paramedics what her medications were and what the incident was on her behalf. At this point, in a tiny room, we have my friend lying on the floor, one paramedic trying to get her safely into a chair, and the other paramedic and I walking through what happened and going through medications. It’s already full. The RA on-call and the PS officer then try to get into the space as well to get pictures of our student IDs for the IRs. I get that you need to do one of those, but this was possibly the worst time. We could barely move as it is, and were trying to handle a medical emergency. That could at least wait until we were out of the room.
But after this, we get to the hospital. It’s somewhere around 9:45 p.m. We were there until about 4:30 a.m., when my friend finally gets discharged. We don’t have personal transportation (neither of us has a car, and even if we did, we rode there in an ambulance anyway). My friend is disabled, so couldn’t walk the distance back to campus even when feeling well, forget just out of the hospital. And she’s still coming down from the high from the morphine she was given at the hospital, so public transportation might not be a good idea. Okay, let’s call the public safety escort.
We get ahold of them, but it turns out they’ve stopped pick-ups for the night. We end up taking an Uber back to campus, but even then, we don’t feel safe doing so. (It’s 4:30 in the morning, and one of us is still very out of it; it just felt like a bad idea.) After waiting, we get back to campus around 5 a.m., and both of us quickly fall asleep.
Here’s why I bring this up. At no point during this experience was PS – the people responsible for student safety on campus – actually helping us be safe. I can understand why they might not touch students having medical incidents. I don’t agree with it, but I understand. But the officer got in the way of the paramedic, and without an escort back, we were stranded in a potentially dangerous situation for both of us.
What if my friend had been bleeding out? Would the officer have continued to get in the way of paramedics then? Did he really think that a photo of an ID was more important than a head injury requiring hospitalization? What about us getting back safely? Ride share violence is a real phenomenon, and a couple of young adults at weird hours in the morning where one has worsened perception and reaction time due to medication are particularly vulnerable. What would have happened then?
I get that PS can’t be everywhere or do everything, but at a bare minimum, not putting students at worse risk due to their policies I think is something they can do. Their policy for how to handle IRs made it hard for the paramedics to do their job. Their arbitrary cut-off time for escorts made it hard for us to get safe transportation. Those are their policies putting us at risk. Their one job was to keep students safe – and not only did they fail that, but in both interactions, they actually made it worse. This is something that needs to be addressed before someone does get hurt.
Public Safety did not respond to requests for comment.