It's not an option.
It's a standard feature
On television, we frequently see cops exchanging gunfire with criminals. In practice, cops rarely hear gunfire except on the target range, and many cops retire without ever firing a gun (although in Lancaster, it seems that cops have declared open season on dogs.)
When we see firefighters on TV, they're standing around watching a fire, with some of them holding hoses squirting water. In practice, though, firefighters are several times more likely to be injured or killed on the job. It isn't just the fire, but smoke, falling debris, slipping on wet or icy surfaces. A friend of mine was walking on a roof and fell through a skylight to his death. He wasn't careless; the building owner had covered over the skylight with a tarpaper and bitumen roofing without bothering to remove the skylight or cover it with something sturdy, such as plywood.
On NewsLanc, a letter to the editor asserts that "Charlie Smithgall will write off as much of the city fire bureau as he can to pay for more police…" I assume that's a fair prediction, as NewsLanc didn't challenge it.
It then goes on to assert that the City of Lancaster is dangerously understaffed when it comes to firemen, according to national standards. Those standards, set by the National Fire Protection Association, a non-governmental group, assert that the first response to a fire should arrive within 4 minutes of the dispatcher receiving the call, and that there be a minimum of 4 firefighters per unit.
In other words, if you have six officers arriving within 4 minutes on two trucks, you don't meet the standard; if you have two fewer officers and one fewer truck on the scene, you do.
It'd be useful to know what the average response time is, and what percentage of the fires are responded to within that magical four-minute time limit.
Lancaster has three fire stations. At the west King street and the east King street stations, they have a rescue pumper and a "quint", a truck that has pump, booster tank, hose, ground ladders and an aerial ladder. The third fire station, on Fremont Street, has one truck, presumably a rescue pumper, although it's not explicitly stated on their website.
If they built two additional fire stations, so that there was only one truck at each fire house, they'd be able to respond to more fires within that four minute window - but would that result in more effective fire fighting? I don't know. In my years as a reporter, I can't recall ever seeing as few as four men on one truck at a fire. It was fairly uncommon to see twice that many; there were usually more.
I believe it was George Armstrong Custer who is credited with saying that a battle usually is won by the guy who gets there "fustest with the mostest". I've sometimes gotten to fires before the fire department did, and seen amateurs running around with buckets and garden hoses and blankets, and in the case of grass fires, wearing work shoes. If you haven't got enough people or enough equipment to stomp on that fire hard while it's small, it gets bigger.
Do we have too few police? Too many? This country has 800,000 law enforcement officers for a population of slightly over 300 million. That's 1 officer per 375 people. The city of Lancaster has a population of 54,000 and 168 sworn officers. That 1 officer per 321 people.
But that doesn't count the State Police and the Sheriff's Department. The State Police doesn't do a lot in the city, although they would if we had no city police, and the Sheriff's Department mostly does things like serve warrants and crowd control - but those ARE duties of law enforcement officers and deputies are included in the 800,000 law enforcement officers nationwide.
Oh, but lest we forget, Lancaster City has been providing Lancaster Township with police protection. At 1 officer per 375 people, Lancaster City should need 144 officers. Does covering the township require 24 additional officers? According to the contract negotiations, it appears that it takes about 8 officers.
So based on these back-of-the-envelope calculations, it appears that we may be weighted a little heavy in favor of police, a little light in favor of firemen. Depending, of course, on the statistics on fire protection that we earlier mentioned are sorely needed.
It occurs to me that there are many skills that are unique to police officers, to firemen and to paramedics, but that frequently those needs overlap at the scene of an emergency. There's a crash, and as the officers arrive on the scene, one of the vehicles breaks into fire. Should the officers remove the passengers from the other car, in case it catches fire, or are they risking damage to the spinal cord that will cause paralysis or death?
If, instead of separate police, fire, and EMS organizations, we had public safety officers that were cross-trained, not only could we respond more quickly to emergencies, but we could respond better to emergencies. We'd need a different type of vehicle, perhaps more like a Chevy Suburban, to carry more emergency apparatus than would comfortably fit in a trunk, but when a fire broke out, you could have two patrol units responding within two minutes, with more arriving all the time, while someone else stops at the fire station, and drives a pumper to the fire. In many cases, someone with injuries can be rushed to the emergency room before an ambulance could arrive.
It would take extra training for public safety officers, and once trained, we'd want to pay them enough to keep them from being "stolen" by other departments, but four competent cross-trained public safety officers and two vehicles would be much less expensive than twelve specialists and six vehicles. What's more, because the time and difficulty of coordinating efforts is much reduced, the services rendered could be much more effectively rendered. I think we could expect better services, at lower cost, while paying our public safety officers more. That sounds like everybody wins - except for those who have established political fiefdoms in the various organizations and unions.
We've said it before; we'll say it again. Charlie and Rick both are personable guys, and they both seem intent on giving, rather than taking. We should be pleased to have such men want to serve. And we should want a better mayor than either one offers us.
Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
Charlie Smithgall - fire - Lancaster PA - police - Rick Gray
Comments
cross-trained public safety officers
Interesting concept, isn't this 'jacks of all trades, masters of none'? Would this not bring triage to a whole new level? Do the 'public safety officers' chase the arsonist, put out the spreading fire, or take care of the injured first? Who makes the triage decisions, the officers at the scene or is this already determined (by the book)?
Look at it another way, would you rather live where the firemen never have to respond to a fire, the police never have serve warrants, or make arrests , and the EMS squads never have to respond to an emergency, or where the firemen are fighting fires every day, the police are making arrests twenty per hour, and the EMS squads are consistently on runs?
The latter is certainly more efficient of the available resources; the former is a safer place to live. Would you rather pay higher insurance rates and have an extremely busy public service staff (in the name of efficiency) or public service employees with little or nothing to respond to?
While improvements are certainly possible, they could also be carried to the extremes all in the name of efficiency or safety. The answer lies somewhere in between the two extremes. Steps in either direction come at some cost.
lsmft
You make a good argument
Interesting argument, and it's not without merit.
As far as firemen responding to fires, police serving warrants, and EMS responding to emergencies, that's pretty much the situation that existed when I was little. There is no state police in Ohio, only a highway patrol, and living in a rural unincorporated area, there were no local police, either. Warrants were served by deputies. There were no firemen; if something caught fire, the people responding were plumbers, merchants, farmers, and other volunteers. The ambulance was owned by the funeral home, and the mortician, likely as not, was the one driving it.
That didn't necessarily make it safer, though.
Would it make the city safer if, instead of having those quints, we replaced each of those quints with five trucks, one carrying hose, one carrying a pump, one carrying ladders, etc.?
There used to be a show on TV about the LA fire department called "Emergency". Apparently LA has their EMTs dispatched from fire houses. When you have a fire, there's a good chance you're going to have burns, smoke inhalation, heat exhaustion, people slipping on wet surfaces (or in winter, on ice), people getting cut on broken glass, punctured by exposed nails, etc, When you have fenders getting bent, you have people denting windshields with their noggins. When you respond to a domestic dispute, or a fight in a bar, you're going to have people bleeding. Arson is a crime. Someone needs to direct traffic if there's a building on fire.
That doesn't mean that every public safety officer needs to be a competent to investigate arson or murder - but if someone sets a fire and a death results, who investigates? I'm not arguing that we eliminate specialists. But we don't currently send arson investigators out to every fire, nor detectives to every shoplifting incident.
But just as you go to your family physician first, and he treats your sniffles and passes the lung cancer cases on to the oncologists, first-responders should be generalists, not specialists. Pull the meter maids out of the police department, and put them in the parks department; they aren't public safety officers, they are clerks managing public resources. Pull the fire safety inspectors out of the fire department and put them in the building department, with the other people who inspect buildings. And merge the police, fire, and EMS functions, with the majority of their employees being first-responders - cross-trained public safety officers that can handle routine emergencies, whether it be a traffic accident resulting in a fire, a domestic squabble that results in a stabbing, or a convenience store robbery where the cashier gets a cup of scalding coffee tossed in his face.
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." - Robert A. Heinlein