Why All The Reindeer Games?
The reality of tomorrow’s emergency and how they will force the hand of change for responders.
Ahh the holiday season. A time to be thankful, joyous and merry. It is also a time to re-connect with your brothers, sisters and extended family over turkey legs, stuffing, and cranberry sauce. For the kids though, this is an interesting time of year. Excited to be out of school for the week, they are now shoved in the car with their siblings, itching from the wool sweater you forced them to wear and shuttled up to Uncle Bob’s house. There is lots of hugging and wet kisses from what seems an endless supply of grandmothers and Uncle Tom asking your first grader what college he plans to go to. Then two of your cousins show up with more kids in tow. It has been nearly one year since seeing both of them and you can’t wait to catch up.
Face to face for the first time in a year the boys and girls quietly look at each other and think: “I am way too cool for you!” With an hour till turkey time, all kids are ushered into the basement. Heidi, the lone, unfortunate 13 year old is given supervision duties. The ice is immediately broken with the sight of a massive couch perfect for jumping on and the mother of all doll houses. Each make a beeline for it: boys embarking on the ultimate WrestleMania campaign, girls dressing Ken and Barbie for a night on the town.
All goes well for a while until it is time for Ken and Barbie to hop in their corvette and drive off. Sadly, the driveway has been blocked by the wrestling matts that have been strewn about the floor. Luckily, Ken has his Jeep as a backup and they proceed to four wheel their way to dinner. When Vince McMahon sees this blatant violation of WrestleMania protocol, he screams out to the girls, “stay off the matt!” “You can’t tell us what to do” they shout back: “this is our play area too!” Ken — not about to miss his reservation, and irritated with the whole concept of the WWF — guns the Jeep and the whole clan of girls plow through the area.
Engrossed in Facebook and her new favorite Taylor Swift song, Heidi is finally unable to zone out the racket when she is hit in the head by Barbie. She looks up to see a full blown pillow fight and a few girls impressively pinning some of the boys flat to their back. Faced with no other option, Heidi texts her mother upstairs for help. Reinforcements arrive and all wrestlers are led upstairs and promptly sat at the kids table with strict orders to be nice and get along.
Funny, it seems like some kids never grow up. Being that many aspire to be a police officer or a firefighter when they grow up, one would surmise some residual holiday angst may percolate to the surface from time to time when they are finally in that profession.
Typically, the playgrounds of police and fire are well delineated and largely adhered to. Police, for example, play daily in places that are strictly within their legal purview: traffic stop, drug bust, bank robbery, hostage negotiation, SWAT activation etc. These boundaries are largely respected by fire and EMS personnel: what firefighter has any business stopping a bank robber? No, fire and EMS stay in the background and come in when the police commander requests them to do so.
Fire, too, largely has strictly defined playgrounds. They get to play at car crashes, wildland fires, medical emergencies, and, of course, structure fires. Police fulfill a critical, but largely support role on those scenes in assistance to the fire commander on scene.
Just like the holidays though, there comes a time — every so often — where police and fire must play in the same playground. Incidents like these are emergencies like an active shooter, an arson with a barricaded and dangerous party, a bombing, or a terrorist attack. Just like that fateful day at Uncle Bob’s house, police and fire may look at one another and think: “I am way too cool for you!” They may not know one another well enough to have a certain degree of trust built up. Yet, the ice is forced to break immediately because police must immediately engage that active shooter to save lives, and fire must actively engage in that same space in order to extricate victims, treat, and transport them to the hospital. It is at that time, where the emergency requires that both police and fire engage immediately — in the same place, at the same time — that raises this incident to the level of a complex emergency.
Conflict on complex emergencies has been talked about formally and informally for years. The 9/11 commission brought the conflict to a very public light when they suggested that agencies must learn to work together better in the face of chaos. The result was a mandate for police and fire to use the National Incident Management System (NIMS) and the Incident Command Structure (ICS)—designed by the fire industry incidentally—on all emergencies or they would not recieve federal funding. That was akin to the parents telling all 8 kids that they had to play, from this day forward, under the WWF protocol: if they don’t adhere to WrestleMania rules, police officer Ken will never get another Jeep, another suit, and definitely wont be invited back to any restaurants. That kind of mandate, when police had not, and did not work well under an ICS structure, continues to cause problems to this day.
Complex emergencies are increasing in frequency: the FBI, for example, recently published a study that today’s emergency response agencies face a 40% increase in active shooter threats since 2007. The trend for active shooter and other complex emergencies where both police and fire will need to engage looks to be pointing north.
Maybe it is time to look for better ways to approach and manage these complex emergencies. A pillow fight is relatively innocent. But having one while a citizen is suffering is a dangerous reindeer game indeed. RFS
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About Me
I am a Firefighter, Paramedic, Lieutentant, and OEM Coordinator with the City of Aurora, CO. I see the passion of all emergency responders in this industry and seek to cultivate it to take our response to the next level. Join me in this team effort.
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