NY Times piece on the Benton Harbor case, which included this very puzzling paragraph:
Mr. Harris began paying debts, laying off workers and considering a plan to merge the fire and police departments into a single unit where firefighters could ultimately answer burglary calls and police officers could put out fires.
I don’t know the details, but does that make any sense to anyone? Why not merge animal control and the assessor’s office? Then, assessor’s can catch wild dogs and you can pay your vehicle registration to the dogcatcher! Why not! I suppose if your magazine’s Business and Economics editor can release videos on how to make a nutcake, anything is possible.
fasteddie9318
Merging the PD and FD doesn’t make any sense to me, but if it results in video of a cop trying to taser a house that’s on fire, I’m down with it.
Snayke
All together now…
The math demands it.
Snayke
All together now…
The math demands it.
Steve
I could see a possibility of saving money by merging the PD and FD administratively, like having the same people do the recordkeeping, the same people answering the phones, etc. Maybe something like that was under discussion and the message got garbled in translation.
Yutsano
@fasteddie9318: That sucker better go viral too. Also.
freelancer
New cup of coffee. You owe me one.
cleek
why not… the FD already does medical first-response in many towns.
Poopyman
@fasteddie9318:
Thread over.
NEXT!
Steve
Here is a link about the idea. Apparently they really were considering cross-training of the officers.
jl
My favorite part:
‘ “That’s all a distraction,” he said. He seemed puzzled by all the fuss over his recent dealings with the commissioners; he has simply informed them, he said, of how Michigan has broadened the reach of emergency managers.
“All I told them was, ‘Hey, guys, you have no authority,’ ” he said. ‘
The story said he was a political moderate, no extremist, so I guess the townspeople should be reassured that their new dictatorship will be reasonable.
Nothing about the new golf courses in the story. Anyone know about the new golf courses? How are they going?
PeakVT
It makes no sense to me. The two forces are frequently called to same events, but they have very different roles and thus training.
GS
It’s a floor wax and a dessert topping.
piratedan
well perhaps there are other applications, perhaps appointed financial managers and waste management drivers could be combined.
Nutella
Fixed.
BGinCHI
What could possibly go right.
bjacques
@fasteddie9318 beat me to it!
They were all for merging the PD and FD in my town until the cops started shooting kittens out of trees.
Erik Vanderhoff
The city of Sunnyvale, CA has a Department of Public Safety; they’re cross-certified as firefighters or paramedics and police officers. Unless you’re in a specialty or command position, you rotate serving six months in the fire division and six months in police. It saves some costs on the administrative and civil employee side of thing and creates accessible reserves of personnel.
fasteddie9318
@Steve: That makes sense. It’s not like policing and fire-fighting are two completely different occupations, each requiring very different sets of very specialized equipment, tools, and training. I’m going to ask my cardiologist/marine sniper/mechanical engineer/NFL linebacker friend what he thinks of this idea the next time I see him.
steviez314
Let’s merge the jobs of Senators and circus clowns.
Oops, too late.
Zifnab
You’ll see Firemen and Police Officers called to the same scene. I could see a scenario where you trained FD officers to quarantine people from the fire zone, or police officers given the medical training that firemen receive.
But one reason you have both departments called for the same event is man-power. Yeah, a fireman could corral onlookers away. But he’d be of better use fighting the actual blaze.
Cross-training a single individual does not give you two individuals. If the Fire Department is busy investigating burglaries or responding to domestic problems, they’ll be less prepared when an actual fire breaks out.
Bill Murray
@bjacques: But tasering is so much more efficient and I have seen no studies that tasering is bad for kittens. I haven’t looked for any, but that’s the best way not to see any.
feebog
As Steve pointed out upthread, it might make sense to merge some of the admistrative functions, such as payroll and personnel. In a small town it might also make sense to have one dispatch system. Cross training the two functions? Not such a good idea.
Phyllis
@PeakVT: And are just as frequently called to events occurring simultaneously at two different sites, only to discover there aren’t enough officers/firefighters to cover either adequately. As did the nearby town in my county that attempted this about five years ago. For about two weeks.
j low
@fasteddie9318:
Merging the PD and the FD is easy. Put your pencil on the right side of the top horizontal line of the F. Make a semi circle that connects the top horizontal line to the shorter middle horizontal line. Done. See? It’s easy!
Dave
I assume these officers will be beating out the fires with their billy clubs? On the other hand, the firemen should be aces at crowd control due to their extensive experience with fire hoses.
Omnes Omnibus
@Erik Vanderhoff: It also has Buffy.
Yutsano
@PeakVT: OT but enjoy your single-payer good sir. Please let us know how it all turns out, though I’m cautiously optimistic.
fasteddie9318
@j low: OH MY GOD THE ORTHOGRAPHY DEMANDS IT!
clawback
Cross-training firefighters and cops is not uncommon. My hometown has used such a system for years and it works fine. Neither job is rocket science.
Phyllis
@Dave: Root beer on the keyboard. Well played, my good man.
jl
@Erik Vanderhoff: But the story suggests that six month rotations through different roles is not the plan.
There is a quote that they don’t want to pay the firemen for sitting around all the time. Which suggests some ignorance about what firemen do when they are not putting out fires.
Sure, I have read stories about fire houses where firemen to sit around too much, and loaf. But anyone who goes out into the real world will notice that firemen train, and do inspections, map hazards, and plan fire fighting scenarios in their off time.
It sounds like the plan is to try to get a smaller force that can do both jobs at the same time. That does not sound like a good plan to me, and I would not want to live in a community that tried such a thing.
Stefan
Mr. Harris began paying debts, laying off workers and considering a plan to merge the fire and police departments into a single unit where firefighters could ultimately answer burglary calls and police officers could put out fires.
As a burglar and sometime arsonist (when not setting fires for fun, I often set them to destroy crime-scene evidence at my break-ins, and, well, just to cause more grief. Hey, I had a bad childhood), I wholeheartedly support this plan. It would really make my life simpler to have to deal with one merged city agency rather than having to evade two separate sets of public servants.
satby
This.
Sadly, Corporate America thinks it does though, and the corporape-tion of the country means that financial managers may try the same stellar business practices with towns, with the same stellar results.
PeakVT
@Yutsano: The bill doesn’t quite lock in a single-payer system; there are options as to what is finally implemented, from what I understand. And it will be a while before anything is up and running. But I think it’s a great step forward.
Stefan
There is a quote that they don’t want to pay the firemen for sitting around all the time.
And why should we pay soldiers for sitting around all the time whenever there isn’t a war?
joes527j
@Stefan:
… whenever there isn’t a war?
That problem has been solved.
fasteddie9318
@joes527j: OK, maybe, but they’re not constantly shooting at brown people, are they? Surely they could be doing something more productive with all that down time.
Barry
@cleek: Uh, yes, and they do this at fires, as well (probably why it happened). There’s a huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge difference from that and police work.
ruemara
Is it too late to sell us out to the Martians?
Tom Levenson
And one more thing: given the very different sources of stress on the job, and the impact occupational stress is known to take on both FD and PD members, what is it going to do to either or both the long term health and the short term effectiveness of someone who has to drop what s/he’s doing in a domestic dispute to enter a burning house?
Just askin.
Calouste
5 dollars says Mr. Harris has an MBA. Or has graduated from Regency University, but who could tell the difference?
WM Rine
According to sources on the web, the Benton Harbor fire department is a volunteer fire department (as are most small- and medium-sized FDs, at least here in Minnesota). Here, they get paid only when fire-fighting and they get about $10 an hour.
So this proposal means having minimum-wage volunteer police? It means you send lesser-trained police officers to deal with fires in order to save $40-$80 an hour? How does that save anything? This sounds like another high-priced consultant submerged in impractical ignorance.
daveNYC
@PeakVT: Forget the training, at least in theory you could maybe train someone to be both a good cop and a good fireman (although the personalities of the two groups are very different). What about equipment? Would the PD be forced to keep the 50+ lb of firefighting kit in the the trunk of their car ‘just in case’? Would the firefighters go around packing heat?
NonyNony
@WM Rine:
Can you point to the source? Because the Times article linked above quotes the head of the firefighters union in Benton Harbor, and I’ve never heard of a unionized volunteer FD.
New Yorker
Can we merge Congress and the Marines? I’d love to see Michelle Bachmann and Paul Ryan deal with a few roadside bombs in Kandahar for a while….
NonyNony
@New Yorker:
Merge Congress with the Marines.
Senate with the Army.
Let’s save money on the Supreme Court and merge them with the American Idol judges.
In all seriousness – I’m waiting for one of these city managers in Michigan to get the bright idea to scrounge up money by selling off advertising rights on the cop cars and fire trucks. Corporate logos on the cars, making the cops and firefighters sew patches onto their uniforms with sponsored corporate logos on them. Stuff like that.
I think it’s only a matter of time at this point.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Erik Vanderhoff:
I live in Sunnyvale, and think it is a stupid idea. I want police and firefighters who are, well, not switching off between two different jobs on a regular basis. On the one hand this aint rocket science, but on the other, I don’t see how they are that same. Just because you are under the umbrella of public safety doesn’t mean that all of those jobs require the same skillset, mindset, or attitude.
AkaDad
To save money, all the Governors could sweep the streets and plow the snow.
Rommie
@daveNYC: Yes, that’s exactly what they do, keep their firefighting equipment in the police car.
Kalamazoo, Michigan has a combined Public Safety department. Go look it up, if you are so inclined. And they aren’t the Keystone Kops or the Ren & Stimpy fire department.
It’s not a question of the concept’s viability. It’s whether it’s a good idea for a place like Benton Harbor, in terms of size and the time it would take to combine the departments.
kc
Better yet, merge the “Emegency Manager’s” office with the police and fire departments. Then Mr. Harris can single-handedly respond to criminal domestic violence calls and put out fires.
Hey . . . he IS the Emergency Manager, after all.
Libby
I’ve done four or five posts on Benton Harbor at the Detroit News and the merger deal of the two departments is on Gov. Snyder’s extortion list of demands in order for the cities to qualify for state disbursements of funding. The premise behind the plan is do drive down costs, meaning benefits for full time public workers. Harris has already fired nine cops but offered to let them come back as part timers without benefits. To be fair, there are at least a couple of other small towns in Michigan that have this consolidated service and say it works.
Also, too, I believe they had a single dispatcher in BH, but Harris fired them and is going to a regional dispatch system.
And yes folks, there is a garbage disposal dispute in this story. Harris fired the long time local company that the locals loved because it provided large item pick up at the curb and also hired the marginal locals like former felons. He’s given the contract to yet another regional company with a very thin website, but it appears they don’t do large item curbside. But they do have a more zealous bill collectors. Probably end up costing the impoverished locals more money. See also the takeover of the water system, which Harris is giving to a company in Pennsylvania.
And finally uncovered a very interesting interview with Harris. On April 7, 2011 he claimed he had already virtually erased the city’s deficit and was on track to see $1 million surplus within a year. As to why he felt the need to dissolve the local govt on April 17th, I leave to you to speculate.
But, he’s got his eye on becoming the EFM in Detroit next, where he served as city auditor for ten years and CFO for two. Yeah, he’s an MBA and he has a lot of old grudges in Motor City. This story has a long way to go yet.
mikeyes
This is an old idea whose time is over, not a new weird money saving one. There are still smaller towns in WI who have cross trained officers, but that idea is fast fading for the reasons mentioned above and those towns are switching over to another system.
It is hard to find candidates capable of passing all of the tests both professions demand and each profession has an ever growing body of knowledge that is hard enough to digest.
In the military you do find those heart surgeon/sniper/engineer/cooks, especially in Special Forces units, but they train constantly and the selection process is brutal. A small town would not be able to afford to train enough persons to handle both jobs. I suspect that the remark was not made with much investigation into feasibility first.
JR in WV
I have actually trained as a firefighter (35 years ago, actually) and enjoyed both the training and the work. I would not be interested in being a police officer, although I have a vast amount of respect for the good officers I know and meet. Both jobs involve self-sacrifice in order to protect one’s community.
I think most fire-fighters would say that reassigning them as police officers violates their (perhaps implicit) contracts. Both jobs are dangerous, but in very different ways.
It reminds me of the mentality that claims outsourcing things saves money – how on earth can adding extra layers of management and profit make software (or janitorial services, for that matter) better and cheaper? Can’t be done. But it can provide a vast sea of funds for giant corps to wallow in, slurping up the money.
Mnemosyne
@Erik Vanderhoff:
Sunnyvale has a very low crime rate and is frequently on top 10 lists of safest cities in America. Benton Harbor does not have a low crime rate, to say the least. Reducing the number of available police officers in a city with a high crime rate seems like a bad idea to me.
greylocks
Cops and firefighters are all “emergency responders”, so in conservathink, this means they’re the same thing.
alwhite
I was a firefighter for a number of years, I worked closely with the local police. I respect the work they do but there is no way the cops are prepared to fight fires, you don’t just grab a hose a squirt water on the red stuff. It takes training and practice. By the same token we were not prepared to act as law enforcement. It takes training and practice to do that job competently.
Perhaps, if you live in Mayberry, this would make sense. In a modern city it is insanity.
j low
@greylocks:
Not to be confused with
first responderspotential terrorists.BobS
There are several smaller cities in suburban Detroit that have public safety officers cross trained in both jobs. I guess one advantage would be cops/firefighters in patrol cars would get to a scene in a relative short time compared to people sleeping at a fire station, which could be the difference between a structure being completely engulfed in flames. I haven’t heard that much negative about the practice, but then I don’t listen that hard.
Similarly, many fire departments do double duty as EMS. I’ve never understood what those two jobs have in common and just assumed that was a way to get something out of otherwise idle time- suburban areas tend not to have a lot of fires.
Dr. Wu
The Port Authority of NY & NJ has a detail of cross-trained cops, firefighters and EMTs who serve JFK, LGA and EWR. The theory being that airport emergency operations is a specialty unto itself. I don’t know how long it’s been around, but it goes way back before 9/11.
DPirate
Well, if you can only afford one or the other… Why don’t they go all volunteer fire department? Still, merging the two is better than citizen bucket brigades.
@alwhite: It is a specialty, like any job can be, but no one is born a fireman or a policeman to the exclusion of the other. Anyhow, wikipedia says Benton Harbor has only 10,000 people. It’s more a village than a city.
The place I live has about 4000 residents and they call it a city. Cross the bridge to another city that boasts maybe another 1000. These places were designated by overly ambitious megalomaniacs. Hamlet, village, town, city are all pretty meaningless in America except in the vernacular.
Tim
I have a friend that’s a Public Safety Officer in one of the suburbs along Detroit’s northern border. He went to both the police academy and firefighter training. He patrols as a police officer probably 80% of the time but if there’s a fire he grabs his fire gear from the trunk of his police cruiser.
This is not uncommon.
One issue with that setup did present itself though. They had a series of fires in abandoned buildings that coincided with multiple burglaries. The thieves were setting the fires in order to tie them all up.