American Sirens by Kevin Hazzard

Author:Kevin Hazzard [HAZZARD, KEVIN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2022-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Down at the base station, John was focused on the reality, not the politics of his job, and so if you asked him why all this was happening, he would’ve said he didn’t know or even care, that he had a job to do, and the rest—all the fighting over budgets and territory and who did or didn’t have the right to run an ambulance service in Pittsburgh—was just details. But when your life raft has sprung a leak and the water begins to rise, the details have a way of flooding in. Unable to block it all out and simply do their job, the medics slowly became aware of the city’s opposition to their work and more specifically its opposition to them. They had some theories of their own about what it all meant.

Nobody actually believed the mayor was resisting their growth out of a distaste for public-private partnerships. His repeated refusal to absorb Freedom House and turn it into a city-run enterprise made this as baseless as any other of the justifications printed in the press. What did seem possible was that it was a calculated political move. It hadn’t escaped John’s attention, as the fighting dragged on into January and beyond, that 1973 was an election year. The mayor had begun his tenure by firing the long-serving and deeply entrenched police superintendent, then disbanded the heavy-handed police tactical squads that were so unpopular in the Black community, and further antagonized the city’s cops by attempting to integrate precincts in majority Black neighborhoods. Handing ambulance operations to Freedom House would possibly cost a hundred twenty cops their jobs, and whether the powerful voting bloc of the police union would’ve forgiven him for that remained seriously in doubt.

Perhaps Flaherty knew this because for some time now his politics had been steadily drifting right, shoring up a part of his base that those early decisions alienated. He came out against school busing and opposed efforts to integrate a middle school. With this shift, he became so popular among the city’s conservatives that he not only won the 1973 Democratic primary but also became a write-in candidate on the Republican ticket and won that too.

“The real tragedy about Peter is that he had the Blacks with him in the early days of his administration,” the powerful state representative K. Leroy Irvis said at the time. “Now we have a jackass of a Mayor who seems only to play to the groundlings.” Irvis, a Black lawmaker who represented the Hill, once considered Flaherty a friend, but now the two men were at odds. “His direction has been definitely anti-Black. As a private citizen, he has a right to his prejudices, but as a leader he can’t be prejudiced.”

Flaherty’s about-face seemed part of a larger political shift, one that also lined up with the views of the man in the Oval Office. “It just ain’t fashionable anymore to give money to Black organizations,” said Bob Pitts, director of the Black Catholic Ministry in the Hill.

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