Episode Summary

10 Questions for the Mayor to ask the Police and Fire Chief Series Question 1:"Chiefs, please show and review with me our joint Active Shooter/Hostile Event Response policy."

Episode Notes

Show Transcript:

Episode 09: #1 Show me our joint Active Shooter Response policy - "10 Questions from the Mayor" Series

10 Questions for the Mayor to ask the Police and Fire Chief Series

Question 1:"Chiefs, please show and review with me our joint Active Shooter/Hostile Event Response policy."

*Bill Godfrey: *

Welcome to our next installment in our podcast series. This time we're going to be doing something a little different. We're actually going to be kicking off the beginning of a mini series where we're going to talk specifically about the topic of what kinds of questions the Mayor, the City Manager, or the County Administrator should be able to ask their police and fire Chief together, and really be able to judge what their readiness level is to be prepared for an active shooter event or to judge where they may have some gaps. We're going to take each one of these questions, 10 questions here, as a separate topic. Our first question in this series is," Chiefs, can you show and review with me our joint active shooter hostile event response policy?" To talk about that tonight and got with me, Tom Billington, retired Fire Chief. Welcome, Tom.

*Tom Billington: *

Thank you.

*Bill Godfrey: *

We got Adam Pendley, Assistant Chief. Adam, thanks for coming. We've got Pete Kelting, Lieutenant from the Sheriff's Office. Pete, thanks for being here. Of course, my name is Bill Godfrey and retired Fire Chief myself. So with that, Adam, let's start with you. Why is this such an important question for leadership of a city or county to be able to ask the police Chiefs and fire Chiefs, why the focus on a joint policy?

*Adam Pendley: *

Well, I think this is probably one of the first indicators as to whether you actually have true integration between your fire police and EMS services in your town or community. If someone has taken an effort to sit down together and write a policy that is literally on the same sheet of paper that avoids contradictions, it avoids assumptions or disagreements or agreements about what another agency is going to do, if you haven't sat down and had a workshop and put those agreements on paper to de-conflict the issues that the different agencies can have, then that's kind of indicative that maybe you are agencies that share the same community haven't been talking to each other as much as they should.

*Bill Godfrey: *

Pete, tell me from your perspective, how important is that that the law enforcement agency and the fire EMS agency, the medical agency, actually have a shared policy that's been written together and signed off by the leadership?

*Pete Kelting: *

Well, Bill, that's a great question because policy supports training, it supports purchase of equipment and it supports the end result of what we do together and disciplines. Being able to work with your partner from fire or EMS or emergency management and know that our training efforts and our purchase of equipment all are supported by policy and that we have the goal to manage incident the same so that it alleviates any type of hurdles as we move forward going down the road.

*Bill Godfrey: *

Tom, what Pete's talking about raises kind of an interesting challenge. Pete's of course from a Sheriff's Office and I know you were fire Chief of a county department for many, many years. In that context, the fire Chief and the Sheriff aren't necessarily in the same chain of command answering to the same person. What's your takeaway on that? Is it still, you think, important to have a shared policy and and why?

*Tom Billington: *

Good point. A shared policy is badly needed. However, traveling around the country, there is no one size fits all. This policy can not be something that you go online and download and change the names. It is a policy that the law enforcement and fire or EMS agencies have to actually sit down together, come up with responsibilities and how to operate. It's an important time to get with your counterpart and figure out things beforehand. As Pete was saying, very important.

*Bill Godfrey: *

Where do you start the conversation? If you're the fire Chief and you've got, whether it's a city police Chief or county Sheriff or some other type of law enforcement entity that you're going to be working with, and I guess we guys, we'd probably need to talk about mutual aid and the importance of that as well. Tom, how do you start that conversation?

*Tom Billington: *

Well, the first thing is, as the fire Chief, he better know the police Chief or Sheriff by first name. You better have that relationship. If not, you need to build that right from the start. You need to be able to go in his office or her office and vice versa, shut the door and say, "Hey, we have something we have to work on here.", and make sure you approach it that way and start the ball rolling. I guess the relationships are so important to build beforehand.

*Bill Godfrey: *

It really does come down to that. Adam, it reminds me as we're sitting here talking about this, I recall you were actually a part of a training incident we had where in a training session, the law enforcement agency was talking about the EMS teams going down range and the EMS team said, "What are you talking about? We haven't trained for that', now for the benefit of the audience, this was quite a number of years ago now, and the law enforcement folks said, "Well, it's in policy." It turned out that it was in the law enforcement agency's policy, and the fire department, it was news to them. Talk a little bit about that surreal moment.

*Adam Pendley: *

Sure. That's absolutely true. Through training law enforcement has received, again, you talk about certain assumptions are made and if those assumptions are not shared with your fire EMS counterpart, you may find yourself standing alone. I'd like to add that in many communities, we already have a structure in place to have this workshop together and start sorting through these policies and we do it with natural disasters. In my area in Florida where I'm from, we already have management from the various agencies involved sit down in a pre planning sort of way and put together a comprehensive emergency management plan for natural disasters. I would think from kind of back to the original question, the City manager or some executive level person who's in this community might ask, "Have we done a similar process for a crime of violence, for an active shooter event? Have we had that same level of comparing notes together to come up with a shared policy that we do with other natural disasters that we have in on the rest of the country?"

*Bill Godfrey: *

Pete, something Adam just said made me kind of click and thinking about this. He made the comment about, "We make assumptions in our policies." I know I've seen more than I would care to admit, fire policies that law enforcement shall do this, we'll do this, shall do that and never vetted with that law enforcement agency, never signed off. How common is that on the law enforcement side? What do you see at the county level, at the city level with those kinds of assumptions that people put in their policies that weren't cross-checked with the people that they're assuming they're going to execute?

*Pete Kelting: *

Well, we certainly hope that we are sharing information and writing policy together, but that is common, Bill. You find that from local jurisdictions, from cities to county Sheriffs, from Sheriffs to state police and other fire agencies around our region, that if we haven't worked together ahead of time to vet those policies to know that we're again, going to train in the same dynamics when it comes to response to these incidents, is crucial. I think there's committees going on now as we know through NFPA and being able to look at standards. Not only do you have the standards nationally, but you also have cultural issues in a sense, are training ways of things. We always have joked in the past a little bit about the East coast versus the West coast of how things are done. They're done differently across the country, but I think we're making great strides and coming together on training committees, on think groups through safety summits and so forth where we know we need to sit down, look at each other's policies, write them if we don't have them, vet them and make sure that we're all on the same.

*Tom Billington: *

If I can jump in Pete because there's two things that you said make sense. One is, you want to see the fire Chief and the police Chief or Sheriff's signature on this thing, both of them. The other thing that happens so many times that we want to make sure does not happen with this policy is, when you ask the patrolman on midnight shift or you asked the firefighter who works at a station 10 miles away, "Tell me about your active shooter policy" and they say, "I have no idea what you're talking about." This is something that it can't go on the shelf. Everybody has to know about it and it has to be drilled and trained as so.

*Adam Pendley: *

It's interesting that you say that because I think it's also important to include your nongovernmental organizations and your private entities that might be involved in these things as well because I can give you a recent example where, again, this was more of a natural disaster example, but every week, we got everyone at the table to start discussing policies and how they would approach the plan. We had some special needs folks who ran some facilities and it was in their policy that law enforcement would transport anyone that has a need to a special needs shelter. Law enforcement had to step up and say, "We would not have the resources for that. That's something you're going to have to be responsible for." So the same thing is going to happen, if you're successful in getting people to sit down, what's everyone's kind of touched on is, wanting to sit at the same table to make sure you de-conflict each other's policies and that you come up with a shared policy that matches industry standards. Like Pete mentioned, you get a better outcome. You're prepared for when that day comes.

*Bill Godfrey: *

Pete, I'm going to point this one to you. I think we've all talked about the importance of having a joint policy. It's just the easy way for the Mayor, the City Manager, the County Administrator to be able to know that those policies had been de-conflicted at the very least, as police Chief and fire Chief were on the same page. What should the Mayor, City Manager, County Administrator key in on when they run into the inevitable situation that the police Chief, fire Chief, EMS Chief, walk in, sit down for the meeting and say, "Well, here's our policy." "Well, here's our policy.", and they say there they're not going to do a joint policy, that this is fine and doesn't need to be a joint policy as we're discussing? What are the things that the Mayor or the City Manager, what do they go look for that tips them that there's still problems?

*Pete Kelting: *

I think when you see that trainings aren't happening together, when you have full scale exercises being conducted in regional settings and agencies aren't participating because they don't believe their policy fits that or they haven't trained to that, if they're seeing that their agency's not purchasing the right resources, that they just don't seem to have the awareness of where the active shooter response from an agency is headed across the country. You look at the recent incidents and the after action reports are clear, when we can learn from previous incidents where we can improve. Time and time again, often that failure to train together, that failure to participate in exercises, failure to support the agency through purchase of equipment, and stay on top of that readiness, that operational need to be responding to an incident, we all, you hear it again, we all say that it's never going to happen our jurisdiction, but look what's happening. It is. It's happening in our jurisdictions.

*Pete Kelting: *

We've got to be ready, our mayors, our Chiefs, our Sheriffs got to work together. They've got to support us with budgets and equipment and training and joint policies.

*Bill Godfrey: *

I think that's very succinctly put and focuses on the right thing. Well, gentlemen, let's wrap this one up here and I thank you very much for your time. For those of you that are still listening, we got nine more questions to go, so please tune in for the other nine part in this series of 10 questions that the Mayor, City Manager, County Administrator should ask their police and fire Chiefs. Thank you.