Data collection, NFIRS, and peer review

I had an interesting conversation the other day with a friend who spent a couple of years as a casual volunteer firefighter. He knows just enough to identify some issues and needs but not enough to be really well versed in their finer points. The topic turned to the (mostly settled) bunker gear vs. turnout coat/hip boots issue. I've heard, anecdotally, that Boston reported a lower injury rate among crews using turnouts/hip boots, but am unaware of any actual study. My friend asked me what the data say about victim survival rates compared to fire stage and firefighter access (i.e., how deep did they get in there?). I had no answer.

This points up what I believe to be a major failure of the fire service and a stumbling block to ours ever being considered a true profession. Dr. Robert Cherry of Penn State's homeland security grad program teaches that for a field to evolve into a true profession it must have, among other things, peer-reviewed journals. The fire service certainly has some solid trade journals (Fire Engineering, Firehouse, and Fire-Rescue all spring to mind) but no real peer-reviewed journals that are known and distributed nationally. There are some cursory efforts, including from the old West Point of the Fire Service, Oklahoma State University, but have you ever seen a copy? I sure haven't and don't know of anyone who even knows of its existence.

Not only do we lack a sober and earnest collective research discipline, we also lack adequate data collection. Part of that is explainable by the fluidity of the fire scene; how do you even begin to design uniform criteria identifying how deep you went or were able to go or where the victim has crossed the threshold into unsurvivable? NFIRS collects some solid and useful data, but mostly it is useful for prevention and construction efforts. It doesn't really tell us anything about staffing levels or equipment performance/ability. Even if we can't gather this information through NFIRS or some other standardized system we could still encourage solid research and analysis. I am of the opinion that the trade journals we do have are too focused on the task level of our job and not enough on the strategic or technical preparation side. For that sort of discussion you have to go to various blogs and some of the reasonable message boards. But those aren't popular enough and many fire departments are run by chiefs who are scared of the internet, sometimes to the point of having valuable training tools (YouTube!) blocked completely.

How do we have rational and objective discussions about realities, hypotheses, theories, and projections for the future? The answer is that we cannot, we have to make do with arguments from tradition and policy made by anecdote. On some points the sort of solid foundation I'm talking about does exist, but that is rare. The fire service has to evolve to hold place in this information-based world. The Heritage Foundation just slammed the federal grants that are so vital to many departments. The Heritage Foundation is just another mission-oriented think tank, but we lack even that and can't make a counterargument with so much as a bagged study like this.

Read, read, read and explore the blogs, they are our internal evangelists.

Are the cops our friends? Are we our friends?

In the homeland security world we are all in the race for the big pie, the federal dollars. That's why it's especially disconcerting to see a national LE figure say something like this: “All my community policing grants turned into fire trucks, and homeland security became the monster that ate law enforcement.” Really? Really?

For starters, I don't believe that is true. Predictably, I believe the fire service doesn't get enough (or the right kind of) attention from the feds when it comes to homeland security. I also believe the cops get too much and want more. They want more money and more control, from street cops who want to tell the fire department when they can disregard a scene to the police chiefs who want to tell the fire chief what is and is not a hazmat incident. Federal grants have only accelerated the power grabs, with LE agencies all over the country moving into fields for which they are not qualified, trained, or experienced. From patrol cars with Level B CPC they don't know how to maintain or put on to police department rescue squads competing with fire department rescue squads, there is a disturbing trend of mission creep for them and marginilization for us.

Budgets are zero-sum games where each agency has to make a convincing argument that it deserves as much or more money as the next. When it comes to fire vs. police we start out at a disadvantage. Few people are scared of fire, but everyone is scared of being mugged (broad generalization). Your agency has to develop a strategic communications plan that combines smart leadership with clear illustrations of public worth. There are a lot of reasons the cops beat us at budget time (they bring in ticket revenue, the public is scared of crime, they market themselves better, etc.), but I think one of the biggest is a fire service-wide strategic problem. Namely, fire chiefs aren't as professional as police chiefs, as a group. We don't have dozens of undergraduate and graduate degree programs at legitimate universities and we don't have numerous truly peer-reviewed journals producing quality research. The fire service needs to stop thinking of itself as a great alternative to college for people "who just don't like school." A fire chief with a technical certificate from a community college or bachelor's from an internet-only school is at a significant disadvantage next to a police chief with a master's degree in CJ from a brick-and-mortar university.

I realize this is an unpopular and maybe inflammatory opinion. Let me be clear: firemen are smart. We all know that, but firefighters aren't always studious or intellectual. I've heard a lot of firefighters complain about being treated like garbage men. To that I'll ask a question: what do you have on your resume that sets you apart from the garbage men? And a hint: weekend NFA extension schools don't matter.