Police and Fire NEED to Talk!

Or do they?

During the September 11, 2001 (9/11) attack on the World Trade Center, police helicopters circling the scene issued warnings about the possible collapse of the tower. However, due to lack of interoperability among the radios used by the police and fire departments, hundreds of firefighters never received this warning and 343 firefighters lost their lives. In contrast, most of the police officers were able to hear the warnings on the police frequencies and to escape in time. Thus their death toll was significantly lower. [1]

This incident, judging by how often it is cited in the literature, has been a driving force in developing American strategy in communications interoperability. The National Emergency Communications Plan produced by DHS describes its vision “is to ensure emergency response personnel at all levels of government and across all disciplines can communicate as needed, on demand, and as authorized, through improvements in communications operability, interoperability, and continuity nationwide.”[2] The National Task Force on Interoperability defines interoperability as “the ability of public safety service and support providers—law enforcement, firefighters, EMS, emergency management, the public utilities, transportation, and others—to communicate with staff from other responding agencies, to exchange voice and/or data communication on demand and in real time.”[3]

These sentiments are echoed in many other state and organizational interoperability plans: the necessity of police, fire, EMS and other governmental response agencies being able to communicate directly with each other via radio.

Since 9/11, homeland security efforts have focused upon interoperable radio communications for local emergency responders of different disciplines; it the primary focus for those seeking grant funding,[4] and millions have been spent to achieve this goal.

PROBLEMS WITH THE PREVAILING WISDOM

The terrorist attack on the Pentagon demonstrates in a very public way how critically important communications capabilities are for public safety agencies. Imagine the challenge of 50 different local, State and Federal public safety agencies responding at the Pentagon — 900 different radio users, operating on multiple radio systems, and attempting to communicate with each other. [5]

The above quote, by a member of the National Task Force on Interoperability, perhaps best sums up the prevailing wisdom on communications interoperability. However, treating communications interoperability as a mere technological problem may actually make matters worse, not better.[6] The assumption that interoperability will be enhanced by direct communications between responders of different disciplines ignores three aspects of large emergency incidents:

* General communications overload

* Uniqueness of disciplines

* Organizational knowledge

General Communications Overload

The corollary response to the quote that begins this section is “Imagine the challenge of 50 different local, State and Federal public safety agencies responding at the Pentagon — 900 different radio users, operating on the same radio system, and attempting to communicate with each other.” A characteristic of large-scale multi-jurisdictional or multi-disciplinary incidents is an overload of the communications system. The nature of such events and the sheer number of responders attempting to transmit messages cause the system to become ineffective. Radio spectrum is a limited commodity — once it’s full, it’s full. Adding more users to a saturated system system in an effort to improve communications only compounds the problem.

Uniqueness of Disciplines

Government has several obligations to the public it serves: provide protection from crime, assist in fire and rescue events, treat the sick and injured, provide utilities — the list is extensive. Because these services are unique (as is the knowledge, skills and equipment required to provide them), government provides different departments to provide these services.

This distinctiveness of the disciplines does not change when operating at an incident together. While all agencies at an incident are working together for a common goal, they are generally working on different aspects of that incident related to their unique mission. For example, a car crash into a utility pole may generate a response by police, fire, ambulance and utility agencies. While all four agencies have a role in the incident, those roles are largely unrelated: police will control traffic and investigate the cause of the accident, fire will extricate the victim and extinguish any fire present, the ambulance unit will treat and transport the victim, and utilities personnel will secure and restore electricity.

While all responders are working together for the goals of the incident, they are not working together on any one task — their cooperation is more akin to a mosaic than a melting pot. Each has their function to perform, which must be coordinated — but in the actual performance of their tasks, each discipline operates separately. Other than being told when to begin and end traffic control, for example, the police will be operating independently from the other disciplines — their performance of that duty requires little communication with the other entities on scene. The overall incident is essentially four incidents in one: a police incident, a fire incident, a utilities incident, and an EMS incident. While the various incidents must be coordinated at a strategic level, at the task level of each discipline is largely distinct.

Organizational Knowledge

Unit-to-unit communications between disciplines at a large incident are fraught with difficulties. Reasons cited for the necessity of such communications include requesting action or to warn of impending danger. Organizational differences make such communications largely impractical.

Requesting action requires organizational knowledge that one discipline may not possess about another. Consider a police unit working at a large incident with a fire department: the police unit notices a previously unnoticed fire in a building, and wants to request that a fire unit, which he sees 300 feet away, to extinguish it. While the request is appropriate and makes sense in the abstract, in practice there are barriers to this to this course of action:

Notification — Although he can see the fire unit he wants to contact, the police officer has no idea what the unit’s radio signature is. Simply put, a radio signature is the name of the unit; without knowing this information, it is impossible to address this unit in particular via radio. Simply seeing an apparatus does not provide a unit signature.

Capability — Members of one discipline do not have the expertise to know the quantity and type of units required to handle emergencies from another discipline. The police officer may have no idea of the capability of the fire unit he sees — it may be a ladder company, which carries no water and has no ability to actually extinguish fires.

Command and Control — The unit the police officer is trying to assign may already be performing a critical assignment for the incident commander, or the crew may already be committed to a task in which disengagement will take some time, essentially rendering the unit unavailable.

So Who Needs to Talk?

Communications issues outlined above demonstrate that not everyone needs to be able to talk to each other at an incident involving multiple agencies. While command and control needs to be exercised over all units, only those units actively working together on the same task need to be in direct communication. Typically, this involves units from the same discipline — units fighting a fire together, for example, regardless of jurisdiction or agency, need to be in contact, as may law enforcement agents attempting to secure a perimeter.

Even this may not apply in larger incidents — at the Pentagon on 9/11, fire units involved in suppression activities remote from each other were on separate channels to facilitate communications. Law enforcement at the Pentagon, however, even though embroiled in the same incident as the various fire departments, had completely different objectives, and did not need to monitor or communicate on fire channels in order to function effectively

Isolating the disciplines, their tasks, and their communications at a large or complex incident is not a failure of interoperability, but rather an enhancement of it — the after action report for the 9/11 Pentagon response stated that the “ACPD should recommend, in incidents not commanded by law enforcement organizations, a Law Enforcement Branch be established within the ICS Operations Section.”[7] By separating the activities and communications of each discipline, organization and communications at an incident are enriched. Interoperability between disciplines happens at a unified command post, NOT over the radio.