Rushing into an ambulance en route to a medical call represented roughly 80% of runs for first responders within the St. Paul Fire Department in 2019.
“Almost 39,000 [calls] were EMS runs,” Asst. Chief Matt Simpson said. And a small-but-devastating fraction of that number often carried with it a criminal element. In 2019, 171 times the medical run was a “penetrating trauma,” which includes shootings and stabbings.
“That’s a shooting and or stabbing every other, basically every other day,” Simpson said.
The bloodshed, however, wasn’t so evenly distributed. It rose to a shocking peak as summer came to a close. Eight people died from gun violence in September alone. A few more were shot that month but survived.
By the end of the year, 30 people died from homicide, the highest total since the early 90s.