“Several minutes had passed and the Ambulance for the suspect was still not on-scene. I requested CAD, via channel 1, several times for an update on when the Ambulance would arrive. My first request was at approximately 1804 hours. CAD advised they would conduct a call back. I then requested an update, via channel 1, at approximately 1806 hours and was advised that they were on hold with [the ambulance company]. At this time, it was decided that we transport the suspect in a marked patrol vehicle.”

Connecticut’s EMS system is in crisis. The signs are all around us, hiding in plain sight. That quote is from a local police officer, from the state Inspector General’s report on the factors contributing to the death of a suspect that had been shot by an officer. The incident is national news and you’ve probably heard about it. You probably didn’t hear that whatever other kind of story it is, just under the surface, it’s an EMS story.

There are many questions being asked about the actions of the police officers involved that night, but the question no one is asking is “Why was a second ambulance unavailable to respond to an officer-involved shooting in the early evening in one of the state’s biggest cities?”. Also left unasked: “How often are the police transporting injured patients to the ER in the back of their patrol vehicles because an ambulance is unavailable?”. In this case, the officers did not end up transporting the patient in their vehicle. The ambulance did eventually arrive.

The ambulance issues under the surface of this tragic story aren’t unique to our cities, and they aren’t unique to Connecticut. But here, they are symptoms of a statewide EMS system on life support, kept alive by a strained mutual aid network, and covered for by police officers who have been forced to improvise ambulance substitutes on the fly. Stories like the one above can be found in the news every day. Scratch the surface and it’s not hard to see the impact of understaffed ambulance agencies and growing response times.

The Mutual Aid Mask

In Connecticut, when a town’s ambulance is busy, a neighboring ambulance is called to respond. This might seem like neighborly cooperation, but it’s also a shell game that hides the lack of available EMS resources. If that neighboring ambulance is also already on a call, a third agency is called.

The mutual aid system keeps the wheels turning, but it also makes the problem invisible. Because the system technically “works” (someone eventually shows up), the public doesn’t see the strain. They don’t see the firefighters sitting on scene for 25 minutes stabilizing a patient while waiting for a transport unit to arrive from three towns over, or the police officers trying to decide if they should just throw the patient into their cruiser and rush to the hospital.

Our Data Doesn’t Tell the Whole Story

One reason this crisis remains hidden is that our data is both lagging and incomplete. Statewide EMS response data is published two years behind. Worse, the way we track ambulance response time is fundamentally flawed.

As I recently discussed with the Hartford Courant, the Department of Public Health only sees part of the data (“CT Lawmakers Seek More Transparency in EMS Response Times”, March 23, 2026). Those response times are recorded from the moment an ambulance is assigned to a call. What isn’t counted—and what the shooting story highlights—is the “wait time” before an ambulance is available to be assigned. If dispatch is “on hold” with a provider for six minutes before a unit is even found, those six minutes aren’t recorded in the state’s official EMS response time data.

Making the Invisible Visible

We can’t fix problems that we can’t see. This is why the EMS response time dashboard proposed by the Legislature’s Public Health Committee in SB-238 is so vital. By requiring DPH to maintain a public-facing, real-time dashboard broken down by town and call type, we can finally shine a light on the system and see where the gaps actually exist.

This kind of transparency is the first step toward understanding the extent of the problem, a step that’s necessary before we can advocate for the supplemental funding the state’s ambulance agencies need to survive. We have towns in rural Connecticut where response times are regularly exceeding 20 minutes. In a cardiac arrest or a shooting, the difference between a 3-minute and a 10-minute response is the difference between life and death.

The shooting incident was a tragedy, but it must also be a wake-up call. The evidence of our failing EMS system is no longer just in a spreadsheet buried in a two-year-old report; it is written in the police logs of our cities. It’s time we stop letting the hidden nature of this crisis be an excuse for inaction.