No fooling, there is actually an academic journal called Homeland Security Affairs, published by the Center for Homeland Defense and Security at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. (Does anybody else out there think that lame word "homeland" suggests we're guarding some gated condo development?) A scholarly paper in a recent issue discusses the suggestion that the government use emergency medical service personnel--paramedics, EMTs, and first responders--as "intelligence sensors." The paper also calls EMS personnel potential "information collectors" and a variety of other euphemisms for what might seem to mean unsworn deputy sheriffs.
I'm an EMS volunteer in a small semi-rural New York community, so somebody forwarded the paper to me, suggesting that those of us manning our town's three ambulances 24 hours a day could soon be asked to add "amateur cop" to our job descriptions.
Why on earth do the homeland defenders think we'd be any good at that?
Because we get to see things that nobody else does.
When somebody calls an ambulance, that person is usually too rattled to sanitize the scene before we get there. (Our small EMS corps' response time is typically from five to eight minutes.) If there's bomb-making paraphernalia in the kitchen, it'll probably still be there when we huff up the front steps with our fat medical duffels. If there are suspiciously swarthy people and women in hijabs, they'll be more concerned with the convulsing child than whether we notice them. If there's a Taliban banner in the living room, nobody will think to put it away. If the meth lab is cooking, nobody will have time to shut it down and hide the beakers and burners. If there are half a dozen doubtful migrants living in a single bedroom, they'll all be peeking fearfully through the door while we do our work.
The Homeland Security Affairs paper also points out that EMS people have an excellent opportunity to spot "trait indicators such as race, religion, ethnicity, or national origin." (Isn't that called profiling?)
There's nothing wrong with a canny EMT noting the obvious presence of an Al-Qaeda cell in a Queens apartment or a Des Moines double-wide, but that doesn't require an act of Congress or the turning of thousands of EMS people into brownshirts.
Empowering and encouraging people who do EMS work to report, without real training, whatever they individually decide looks fishy is not a good idea. Some EMTs would love the assignment--the ones who swagger around with stethoscopes around their necks, lots of insignia on their uniforms, and are the first to tell you what jerks real MDs are. Others want nothing to do with ratting people out because maybe we don't agree with their lifestyle or we see terrorists under every bed.
Citizens spying on citizens has been an intrinsic part of political systems in some other cultures, but it rarely has succeeded in this country, although certainly vigilantism has blackened some of the darker chapters of our history. It's bad enough that bin Laden has turned us into a nation of people willing to take off our shoes, strip out our belts, let down our hair, and--soon--walk through body-imaging machines, but the hysteria has to stop somewhere.
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