AFS1970

It is entirely sue to the us and them mentality that is still present in most departments. Despite the fact that dispatching is more and more of a technical specialty now, it is still considered by a good number of police officers and firefighters as something any idiot can do. A good job for your kid who can't pass the agility or your cousins simple minded nephew who just got out of jail. Some just see it as a place for their wives or girlfriends who just like to listen to scanners and want to feel like they are involved. Maybe as a stepping stone for someone on "the list" until they get called for their real job. Even more are upset that they can no longer use the dispatch center to hide the sick, lame and lazy, while they wait for their 20 year pensions. Most of the public does not even know that dispatchers exist, if they call the fire phone they think they are speaking to a firefighter and if they call the police phone they think they are speaking to a police officer. Even if I answer the phone with my title of Dispatcher, I am often called officer, inspector, detective or some other title. Sometimes I think caller for EMS calls think I have to hang up quick to go drive the ambulance. There is little or no public education because most of us are divisions of larger departments and they refuse to include us in those efforts. Think back to school career day, ever see a dispatcher come and talk about their job? Yet if you suggested a career day without a firefighter or police officer the school would freak out.

I believe that despite IFSTA making Spanish language textbooks that NFPA 1001 requires the ability to speak and read English. A few years ago at a VFD conference on a cruise ship (yes it is a fun way to accomplish training) we got a tour of the fire protection systems by the ship's safety officer. He was Italian and said that since his fire crew was made up of employees from other sections of the ship that respond when needed, he had 56 different languages spoken by members of his team. Because of this English was the only common language and as such operations were in English. This meant that speaking English was a requirement to be on the fire control team. I found it interesting that in an international setting, he was far less hung up about English that we seem to be in an English speaking country.

We had a similar case many years ago in Stamford that involved fake marine distress calls. I know that federal charges were brought against the culprits after they were found. It was a cooperation between the USCG, our Marine Police, The police on land (including a USCG veteran who carried marine charts in his patrol car) and a couple of us in Dispatch helping to match up the various maps in use. That case was the first conviction of a relatively new law. I am not sure that being familiar with the lingo makes the suspect a member or ex-member of one of the services, as much of this information is readily available. Even in the pre-internet days I could get a book at Radio Shack with a somewhat accurate list of codes and signals. Now there are many sites with similar information and so many places use the same or similar codes or even plain language which makes it much easier to fake. Maybe it is time to adopt a secret code like a color of the day and cancellations or upgrades are not accepted without the password.

Even if it wasn't an inaccurate replica, it clearly says New York on it. I was always under the impression that in order to be guilty of impersonation you not only had to represent yourself that way but also that a reasonable person would believe you to be what you say. So if he drove that around NYC, it would be a different matter, but really does anyone in England think that looks like a police car at all? If has no lime yellow stripes or checkerboards. The lights are red not blue. The patch has no crown on it. Who would honestly think it was a real police car?

Congrats.

questionable rules are an issue in many agencies. In my old department I had always heard that you had to be 21 to drive. I never gave the rule much thought. We had a kid join at 17, and get his FF training and start asking to drive almost as soon as he was 18. He went and got a job driving dump trucks also. He kept being told that he had to be 21 and that it was an insurance rule. I was an officer at the time but had little direct interaction with the insurance company so I didn't know for sure. Then a few senior drivers started saying that they drove when they were 18. One night our insurance agent came to put on a driver safety talk and in some of the case histories he talked about he mentioned 18 y/o drivers. So I asked him and he said they had no rule, they only said we had to have some rule and follow that rule, didn't matter to them what our rule was. It turned out that the 21 rule was just to block a couple of people from driving. Oh and our internal rule was not written down anywhere. Now based on that experience, if this squad had a written rule requiring 21, and the 20 y/o drove, he might have been considered uninsured. Not agaisnt the policy so much as not covered by the policy. I tend to agree that the rules are the rules, but we also have to be constantly reviewing our rules to make sure that they are in fact beneficial to the department operation and the community we serve. We need to make sure they are outdated. For some reason driving rules seem to be some of the most contentious ones we have. Some examples I have seen in a few departments, that are somewhat similar to this case. A long time volunteer who never started driver training gets hired by a career department. While there he is trained to drive a variety of apparatus and frequently assigned as a driver. This department is much busier than the volunteer department. A few years later and a couple of different career departments later this member is willing to be an active volunteer and is turned down for driving due to lack of experience and responsibility. A member of a neighboring department that runs M/A into a local department frequently including water supply leaves the first department and joins the second department. The second department will not let him drive due to lack of experience. After about a year he asks again and is told he has to start on the Rescue but has to memorize all the hydrants first. This despite the fact that when driving the water supply M/A engine he could rely on maps or orders from the IC and the fact that the rescue will never be called upon to take the hydrant as it has no pump or hose. A member wants to drive the smallest vehicle in a department that is the rescue. Told they have to be an EMT first, despite many senior MRT's driving. Get their EMT asks again and is told it is an experience thing. Goes to work for a commercial ambulance as a driver. Finally begrudgingly told that they can drive but be careful. Clearly that member was being blocked for some other reason.

I have heard that there is strong national pressure to go to the black and white, I have even heard of grants to do so, although I have never seen these grants myself. Some larger cities or places with a strong identity may not go to this, but more and more places seem to be going this way. My city in CT even was ordering California spec lightbars even when we had blue cars.

It's funny, nationwide there is a move to make all police cars look alike, and then here is a commissioner who realizes that there is a reason for them looking somewhat different. We had a similar thing once, our park police used to drive dark blue cars, at the time the city police were in light blue. The parks department got a manager who could not tell dark blue from light blue so insisted on the new pars cars being white. They looked horrible so they got a green stripe added. A few years later the city police were in black and whites and the parks police (no under a different manager) ordered black and white to match. That caused an uproar, that lead to labor board issues and now they are in dark green and white with the same lettering style but a different color. They just say police not parks police so most of the public has no idea why there are two color schemes. Oddly enough they have the city police patch on them not the special police patch worn by the parks officers.

I don't even see the value of this project. FD units in \various cities have been on scene or near criminal acts before. In adition to questioning this assignment on its lack of merits, I question how efective it would be even if it were a good thing.

I guest FASNY didn't donate enough to the campaign.

Yay big government! Maybe they can outlaw the sun next.

I think it is a good idea, one problem that will come up is affiliation. In CISD/CISM it is usually considered taboo to debrief your own department or incident. I can see that a project like this will require you to talk about stuff with someone from several towns away. Not impossible, but might be a little impractical in a short term setting. One of the things that makes AA and other similar programs work is that they have local groups, that anyone can go to and they pride themselves on maintaining confidentiality. In CISD/CISM there is always the fear that word will get back to your department about how "screwed up" you really are. Still, I am interested in seeing where this project goes.

That is only because Blue Thunder was hit by a train!

I have seen sergeants in one FD outside of Atlanta, I am not sure if the other departments in the area used that rank or not. As for EMS and Fire comparing, the same could be said for FD & PD using different titles for the same or similar ranks. To top that off each service oten has some ranks that have no equivilent or are otherwise inserted in the structure. As an example here in Stamford there has been in the past a Batalion Chief rank in the FD and a Major rank in the PD, while neither of those jobs are in current use they skew the comparison which was already off by a few. A few years ago they changed the PD Deputy Chiefs to Assistant Chiefs but in doing so they all got another star, which makes the new rank higher than the old one and making equivilent titles harder to figure out. I know in NJ it was quite common for independant EMS to have a captain as the highest officer but also have sergeants as the lowest. I knew someone who had the odd sounding title of assistant captain, although she wore a single bar like a lieutenant. This was in a combined FD/EMS department but I think EMS had originally been seperate in that town. I know of two NJ EMS depatments that changed their titles from captain to chief and lieutenant to assistant chief because of the feeling when addressing chief officers in local FD & PD's that they were not being given the respect of their counterparts. One former captain was flat out told he could not attend a townwide "chiefs meeting" because EMS only had a captain.

You can't legislate breaking equipment, however you could forbid the use of reclaimed water that has ben exposed to hazardous materials in live fire training.

RIP.

Point systems are good but they are often subject to the people with low points fighting the standard. In my old department we required 50 points to vote and remain in good standing. We had 40 drills a year, and 12 meetings a year, which equals 52 weeks in a year. Although I don't know of anyone doing it, but in theory you could attend all drills and meetings, except 2 and never go to a call and still remain in good standing. A small group wanted to rais that up to 75 points, it failed in the meeting. Not because it was not a good idea but because all of the people who made 50-74 points got to vote on loosing their right to vote. Another issue we had was points for training. When I joined you got points for the regular weekly drill only. I am happy to say that when I was an officer we changed that so you got points for any approved class, so that new guy that is taking FF1 2 or 3 days a week got a point for every session. Funny thing was we had a kid join, who's father was a veteran member. This kid was never very active as far as calls went but in his first year took a combined FF1/FF2 class (one of the first in our area) an MRT class and then a bridge class to upgrade to EMT. So he had really high hours and points for training. His own father looked at that list and said there was no way his kid had all those points. When I explained that he did the father lobbied hard for most of those classes to not count. I am a strong proponent of points systems, but I also like to combine them with a system of hours, which most computerized report systems will tell you. This is because I can go on 10 calls that are all false alarms and get 10 points and put in 2.5 hours. And someone else could go to 5 calls that are all fires and get 5 points but put in 15 hours. I once proposed a system that balanced 4 factors, points, hours, seniority, and rank. I used to produce that list every year and post it. I was told it was much to complicated to follow. It did require some math to produce but not to read the list when it came out. However the people that were not competitive in more than one factor did not like any system that put the wrong people ahead of them.

Just think, if we had been given seats in Parliament, we'd still be drinking tea. Then again we got rid of "No taxation without Representation" the minute we allowed states to tax non-residents who worked there without letting them vote in both states.

Unfortunately the only thing that drives this need is unpaid bills, not patient care. IN the DC case, the money owed was probably a big motivator for the bosses to get involved. In the MN case, they said as much that it is to keep costs down. This has been the unintended consequence of pay as you go ambulances, that patients are now seen as billable, even frequent fliers, until they stop paying their bills. However there is no motivation to try and fix these problems as long as someone (insurance, medicare, medicaid or even the patient) is paying for the trip. The guys in the field can tell you all the frequent flyers and how much of a problem they are but the bosses don't get involved until it starts costing them money.

Where individual differences come in would be in the specific duties each officer has in the By-Laws. Some of the executive officers are fairly standard out of Robert's Rules and others may be different. Some departments might have a Sergeant-at-arms and others do not. Some have separate Directors or trustees that see to the department property and in others this is part of the function of President or Vice President. In my old department it was very clear who could and could not sign contracts or other legal documents on behalf of the department. It is often confusing dealing with government officials when this comes up as most people just assume that they should be dealing with the Chief of any given department/company.

I only have experience in one department and during most of my time the executive officers were little more than placeholders letting the line officers run the show. That changed with two executive officers who actually knew what their job descriptions were, one of whom was a former line officer. In the (somewhat) modern fire service I have seen a tendency to downplay the importance of these staff positions and in doing so put people in them who really can do nothing to further the interests of the company. I remember hearing about one nearby company that did not file some paperwork for a few years, yet they had a secretary who should have. Allot of times they pick some young guy to be secretary who has never done anything like that job and nobody bothers to show him the ropes. If you did this with a line office, you would be laughed out of the fire service.

This morning leaving work I found myself nearby an incident again, Nobody was on Zello at the time. I posted an IA from my phone, but had to update it to clean up some formatting issues when I got home to the desktop. To bad nobody else was on Zello to post for me.

Not being a Facebook user, do IA's posted here automatically transfer over there? Anything I post will be forum only, not FB.

Our last two self dispatching agencies gave that up in the late 1980's (before I came to work) and we still get the same complaints. Of course some of the complaints are justified others are just trouble makers on one or another side of the microphone. Some are caused by agencies that should not be involved getting involved. To a very large extent this is the nature of the beast and there is no way around such complaints.

Right after taking the PIO course, I was at a fire and the media was looking for a spokesman. Even though I had been on the initial engine crew, I was now assigned to something that was less critical. I went to the Chief and told him, he said he was too busy. I offered to be the PIO (after all he had approved me going to the class) however he didn't want that. So they interviewed a Police Lieutenant who knew nothing about firefighting who told them all sorts of interesting things about the fire. All in all a bad call from the Chief. Always make sure you have someone from your service do it, preferably your own department. Yes they should, but after meeting a few reporters in the PIO class they had an interesting perspective. Just like firefighters see it as doing their job to put out the fire and not be bothered by the media, the reporters see it as their job to get the story and to do that they want to get as close as they can and talk to as many people as they can. Obviously I think the reporters needs are at best secondary to the fire service needs but meeting them in a non incident environment made it somewhat easy to understand where they are coming from on scene. Also while some chiefs think that they are the only ones allowed to talk, they can assign anyone they want to this task. The media doesn't care so much who they are talking to and they will go with any title you present, even Acting PIO or Incident Media Specialist. IF you don't have a rank and get this assignment make something up if you want, as long as it can be backed up later. They don't need to see a white hat because most of them are only marginally aware of what that means.