Are You Talking to Your Local Law Enforcement Personnel?

Gordon Graham here again – and I hope all is going good for you and yours and that you have successfully weathered the most recent series of storms – and of course the good news regarding the wet weather is that it may help out with some of the “serious” water issues that our State is facing. I suspect that we will be having some major “water” concerns in our future – but this rain (and more importantly the snow) is certainly necessary to help abate the recent drought conditions in our state.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have a “flood of money” all of a sudden showing up to help our current financial situation – but that is not going to happen – and continuing on with my last piece for this site – we must remember that it gets down to “money in” and “money out” – and if you can’t increase the amount of money coming in – then we must somehow reduce the amount of money going out – and I don’t want to see people getting laid off when there are other expenditures that I view as “unnecessary” (and I listed them in the last piece) – and apparently my thinking made some of you think – and I sincerely appreciate that some of you took the time to give me your thoughts – including some of the emails that came to my personal account.

I tried to respond to each of you who wrote in – but it is tough to write back to the “Kinkos” email addresses – so for the few of you who sent “interesting” comments from anonymous email addresses – I will stick with the gist my initial comments. Everyone in every government organization must be thinking about “public perception” and what “you” can do to reduce the flow of money leaving your organization. Everyone has a role here – and we are all accountable for our personal actions.

Enough of that stuff – but I would like to continue on about “personal accountability” and “emails.” As everyone in the fire service is aware – there was a terrible “incident” recently up in the Santa Barbara area involving a cop (from my old department, oddly enough) and a group of firefighters.

For those of you who have been busy with watching the Olympics (and Mrs. G and I watched the first U.S. vs. Canada hockey game live in a saloon in Canada – and we were very quiet throughout that game) – the “cop vs. firefighter” event in Santa Barbara was quite an embarrassment for the cop – and his agency – and I will apologize right now for his behavior – and I tried to do so in the numerous emails I got from firefighters around America who read about this and know my relationship with the agency that employed the involved cop.

Apparently our “boy wonder” cop got upset about where the local fire department (and oddly enough I had just provided some training to some members of the local fire community in Santa Barbara and during that program I mentioned my “being tired of firefighters getting arrested for where they park their rigs”) and that is what the cop did – and the story says that he handcuffed a firefighter – and threatened others with arrest – and essentially acted like a buffoon – but fortunately someone got on the horn and got a Sergeant on scene and the Sergeant tried to smooth things over – but what was done was done – and indeed none of what happened was acceptable.

On the lighter side – apparently some of the local Sheriff’s office personnel delivered a cake to the involved fire agency with a “file” in it – and you have to admit that was funny – and clever – and hopefully the apologies will smooth things over in time – and more importantly that nothing like this will ever happen again.

With all of this in mind – let me ask you a question? Is this the first time that this idiocy happened? Is it the second time? Sadly – and I know this for a fact – this is an all to regular event. It happened when I was a cop, and it happened when I was a Sergeant. It happened when I was a Lieutenant and a Captain – and here I am retired and it is still happening. And as you know – it happens in every State in our great nation.

Allow me to digress for just a second. As a street cop in the 70’s on the freeways in downtown LA – there were regular disputes between the freeway cops and LAFD personnel – and always over vehicle positioning at collision scenes – and related issues. My “bias” back then was to keep as many lanes open as possible – and to open the freeway as quickly as possible. The last thing we wanted was a “queue” (and for you “word people” queue is the longest word in the English language where the entire word has the same sound as the first letter – and someday you will be on “Jeopardy” and you will thank me for this) because the queue will cause a whole bunch of secondary collisions – and there is a whole mathematical formula out there re “length of queue” in terms of time and distance and how many other wrecks you will have – so the “cop bias” is to get the lanes opened quickly.

The fire department bias is completely different. You guys didn’t care about secondary collisions (as long as they don’t involve your personnel or rigs) and your concern was “on scene” safety, patient treatment, and having the ability go get to your equipment – and I later learned that a lot of this access was on the right side of your rigs – but nonetheless – there was a complete lack of “on scene” cooperation and communication.

I could do nothing about this as a cop – except control my own behavior – and I am happy to report that I never handcuffed a firefighter – well, an on duty firefighter anyhow – but there was once this time off duty…. Just kidding!!!

As a Sergeant though, when the problems were continuing between cops and firefighters – and it was a two way street by the way – because occasionally your people did some very stupid stuff on freeway incidents – I was able to do something about it. I recognized what the problem was – a lack of communication and the “bias” issue – so I did something about it. And my oh my did I get in trouble for this!

I ordered my afternoon (“B”) shift cops to visit the LAFD fire station nearest their beat – to introduce themselves to the firefighters there – and to at least once a month get to the fire station at the start of shift (1400 hours) and to “buy in” for dinner that night. Holy Moly! You would have thought that I had shot the Pope with that one. I got a Union beef instantly – and all the vitriolic comments behind my back and it was not pleasant.

But fortunately my Captain was also aware of the problem and he backed me up – and my cops “had” to eat with firefighters at the local stations once a month. And I was happy because I really thought that if they just knew each other – either by recognition or by name – that maybe these conflicts “on scene” would reduce in frequency.

Things did start going better on freeway operations – in fact a lot better – and the conflicts on “B” shift (cop “B” shift – not FD “B” shift) went down to nothing. But talk about “unintended consequences” – I could not get the cops out of the fire stations. Apparently my boy and girl wonders learned that you guys could cook – had a television set – and it was a great place to write reports and hang out.

The bottom line is that communication by and between FD and Law Enforcement personnel has got to be “ongoing” – and disputes have got to be addressed before they occur – and both the FD and the LE personnel must understand the “needs” of each other so that these disputes do not occur. These ongoing conversations must include safety issues (and check out www.respondersafety.com and www.firefighterclosecalls.com), vehicle placement options and other issues like the dangers of roadway incursions.

And don’t forget to include the medical people in these conversations – and for that matter the tow truck people and anyone else who has a horse in this race – because they too are “essential players” as these freeway (and other roadway) incidents develop.

And as long as you are talking to your local law enforcement personnel – listen to what they say about their needs – particularly the part about FD people washing evidence away prior to analysis by LE people – and my favorite (and this is classic) well meaning FD people collecting all of the shell casings on an officer involved shooting and putting them in a paper bag prior to LE arrival. That is not helpful!

Anyhow, like anything else in life – so many disputes – up to and including the ongoing issues between Israel and some of their neighbors – can benefit from dialog – preferably prior to the nuclear weapons being deployed – or in your case – prior to another firefighter being arrested by someone who just did not understand what is going on.

That is it for now. Thanks for visiting this great site and I look forward to seeing you again next month.

Gordon Graham
Co-President, Lexipol