Combining public safety responsibilities wouldn’t work in Youngstown

EDITOR:

Increasingly, government and taxpayers are looking for ways of getting more bang for their buck. At first mention, using firefighters as cops in their downtime sounds like a reasonable way to increase police manning on the street, but there are many problems involved in implementing this in a larger, high call volume, city type of setting.

To understand this, let’s first look at how the standard fire department works. Most fire departments generally work a 24 hour on, 48 hour off schedule. That means that for the fire department the work week is actually 56 hours not the average 40 worked by most professions. If you look at Youngstown, we have a minimum of 32 firefighters required for each day on the 3 day cycles we work. That means that it takes 5,376 hours of labor each week to keep the fire department operating at its current level. If you were to make the entire fire department into Public Safety Officers, you would have to put them all onto 8 or 12 hour shifts and they would have to work a 40 hour work week. If you did that, you would be paying the same amount of money for 3,840 hours of total labor. That is equivalent to a manpower loss of 39 firefighters just by switching to the 40 hour work week.

If you were to tie up most of the fire department on police related calls, there would be a shortage of personnel to answer a fire call since you can’t just drop what you are doing and leave. It also wouldn’t take criminals long to figure out that they could easily and effectively thin out the ranks of the police by simply lighting one or two well-placed fires. The effect would be adding fires to Youngstown’s already high arson rate.

The current response to a house fire is three engines, one ladder, one rescue squad, and two battalion chiefs. The number of police cars required to come to a scene would be around nine. Assuming the city has two people riding in each car. Those nine cars would be out of service for around four hours or more for a fire. Since shifts would change every eight hours instead of once every 24 hours, you have a good chance of running into more overtime on a daily basis. If there was a second fire at the same time, it is questionable whether or not we would even have the resources to respond adequately.

The final argument to be taken into account is one of specialization and education. The fire department does everything from putting out fires, to specialized rescues, to vehicle extrications, to many other things too numerous to list. Each certification that a firefighter holds requires not only the initial education to get that certification, but also a minimum amount of continuing education to keep them. When you start adding on education and continuing education for police officer, you start to force your personnel into more down time for education classes. There is a point where the efficiency of one single person doing police, fire, and E.M.S. becomes diminished. With a call volume like Youngstown’s, that point would be reached quickly.

Both police and firefighters have stressful and very dangerous jobs, and for all or our faults, we do the very best we possibly can. By combining the jobs you will add more stress, more danger and increase the amount of injuries to the public servants and the public we serve. There is a limit to the “economy of operation” principal and once you pass that limit; you will end up costing yourself more in the long run. This argument is not an argument of simple numbers. The measure of success for us is not in dollars and cents, it is and forever will be measured in lives. Our department has shrunk to about half of what it was just 20 years ago, and we are covering the same area as we were back then (keep in mind all we did then was fight fire). The fact of the matter is that we are doing much more with far less.

TIMOTHY M. FREASE

Youngstown

X The writer, a Youngstown firefighter, is responding to a column in last Sunday’s Vindicator suggesting that some jurisdictions consider the possibility of combining some police and fire operations.