Driving home from work through Galewood Friday night, I was chatting with my sister in Ohio about her new kitten when I passed two figures to my left. One was on the ground at the corner of Oak Park Avenue and Belden, struggling. The other, a woman, looked in shock and desperation at passing cars — an urban deer in headlights. I turned around at Medill and when I stopped, I found a man in the mud, still struggling to get up. The woman was gone.
“I’ll call you back,” I told my sister, sure all would be over and fine in, say, 10 minutes.
I was wrong. In half that time, my cocky self-assuredness unfolded into an illustration of Chicago’s systemic failures and the staggering complexity of being human.
I stopped my car at the crosswalk, flashed my emergency lights and got out to check the man. “Sir, are you all right?” I asked.
He was crouched, blood running from under his blue baseball cap, splashing, three, two, one on the sidewalk before he grasped my elbow to pull himself up — not quite upright, but enough so I could see ribbons of blood from the right side of his head to his chin.
“Sir,” I said. “I need you to sit down. You’re ok. You’re safe.” A small man, he came up only to my chest. He looked at me with eyes the color of the mist under the streetlights. Shockingly colorless.
“I’m calling 911,” I said.
He grew alarmed. No. No. No, he said, again and again, flailing his arms. I held his elbow. “Sir, it’s ok. I’m here.”
I dialed 911 and a dispatcher answered before I heard it ring. The man tugged at my arm as I held him steady and tried to explain to the woman that I was with an injured man. “Do you need an ambulance?” she asked. “Yes, I think so,” I said. She transferred me to Chicago’s fire department.
As I waited, I saw the blue lights of CPD down the street. I waved, certain the officers were looking for us. But they drove by.
The new dispatcher flung questions at me: Is he injured? Do you know him? Is he drunk?
By now, the man had stumbled to my car, more to support himself than to flee. He didn’t smell like alcohol. I asked him: “Are you drunk?”
“Yes,” he said. “No.”
“Do you want help?” The dispatcher had me ask that. “No,” he said.
For her, the call was over. He was a drunk who declined help. “Ma’am, we do not have to come out to help a man who declines medical treatment. He’s an adult.”
White-hot anger flashed in my brain. She was not nice. I was not nice. I told her he was 70 or 80 years old, and he appeared to be confused, not drunk. She pushed back: We have him on a recorded line saying he doesn’t want help. And as we argued, he grew more agitated, shuffling to the driver’s side of my car as if he were going to get in. “You could flag down a police car,” she said. “I did.” I am sure I growled. “No one stopped.” All the while, she could hear me try to prevent the man from stepping into oncoming traffic. He didn’t look, just walked.
Exasperated, she said: “Well, are you going to stay with him?” “Why do you think I called?” I said.
Like magic, the police dispatcher was back on the line asking me to describe the man. He is a small man, I began, and watched him shuffle across Oak Park Avenue, dressed in a denim jacket with a sherpa collar and blue jeans longer than he was tall and wider than his girth. Mystery kept them at his hips. He had never let go of the tattered CVS bag tied so tightly at the top.
And here I was, standing in my Banana Republic wool jacket in the rain in the middle of a crosswalk with my iPhone at my ear, arguing with the powers who are supposed to save us while I watched a bleeding man pivot at the corner like a wind-up toy, unsure of which direction to turn.
The dispatcher said police would come to conduct a well-being check. I know what those odds are. Last year, a Chicago Tribune analysis of 2022 data found that it took police in the 25th District 10 minutes or more to respond to a call – but that’s only for the most urgent cases. Later in 2023, an Inspector General report showed that no one knows what the true response rates are because half of recorded 911 calls didn’t include the time of an officer’s arrival after a call was made.
Powerless, I left.
In the car, I called my sister. Tell me about kittens, I said.
But the white-hot rage never went away.
Consider this: None of us knew what was wrong with the man. Not me, not the dispatchers, and maybe not even himself. For whatever reason, he was confused, he fell, he was bleeding. According to the National Institutes of Health, six in 10 people with dementia wander. Could that have been him? He also hit his head. More than 32,000 people ages 65 and over die from falls, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates. It’s not always instant, and early intervention can sometimes help.
Dementia patients can’t give consent. And in some cases, intoxicated people can’t, either. For example, it’s legal to cut those off who have had too much to drink in bars and restaurants. They can’t consent to drink more, even though they are adults. Illinois State Police are permitted to intervene with cases in public spaces and can authorize that the person be taken home or to a medical facility. And Chicago’s Emergency Management Services policies and procedures permit EMTs to assess people to determine whether they are able to give consent. They stipulate agencies that can be called for help and permit responders to transport people who resist medical treatment to the emergency room after all other methods of persuasion have failed.
In this case, no one even tried. In the five minutes between the time I dialed 911 and I got back into my car, one person made the snap decision that it was ok to let an injured man, drunk or not, suffer.
At home, as I was washing my hands, I realized I’d never asked him his name.
All I said was “I’m here. It’s ok.” I can tell the two people in my family with dementia I got you and they calm down. But this man didn’t know me from Adam. A name. A simple, human gesture. Had I not treated him like something to be saved rather than someone to help, maybe the results would have been different.
We all failed him: Me with my bravado in thinking I could make Chicago’s police and fire departments do what no one else has been able to achieve, and in making decisions for a stranger. And then there were those who vowed to serve and protect. Indeed.
Police-bashing is too easy, but that doesn’t mean people never need help. If policing in this country is ever fixed, let’s hope they don’t forget about folks like this one, small man. People with addiction, people with dementia, people of color and people without papers are all still people, despite the labels we affix to them. They all deserve attention and compassion.
To him, I ask forgiveness. I should have asked you your name. I hope you’re safe from whatever you were wandering from. If there’s a next time, I pray you find a much stronger elbow than mine to cling to and that an even stronger one never lets you go.