Buildup Strains Public Safety

The U.S. military buildup for a possible war with Iraq is posing security concerns close to home as police forces, fire departments and other emergency services across the nation find their ranks depleted by overseas deployments of reservists.

A significant percentage of the reserve forces that make up half of the national defense also work in their civilian lives as so-called first-responders, protecting cities across America.

The overlap was not a problem in the past, when the military took the citizen-soldiers it needed in infrequent call-ups; the numbers were small and the service period short. The Pentagon has never tracked how many of the nation’s 1.3 million reservists wear a second hat in the vast network of local emergency services. And many employers were not even aware that some in their ranks were moonlighting as military reservists.

But with the federal government’s terrorism alert moved up to “high risk,” all of that has changed. With conflicts brewing in Afghanistan, Iraq and North Korea, and peacekeepers posted in Kosovo and Bosnia, the need for troops is vast and the terms of service open-ended, putting a strain on families, businesses and communities at home.

To date, more than 150,000 National Guard and reserve soldiers have been mobilized. In California, roughly 8,000 have been called up. “It’s a balancing act,” said Navy Capt. Barton Buechner, a director at the National Committee for the Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve, an organization formed to assist reservists and those who employ them. “When we structured the reserve forces and the support elements for those forces, we were not dealing with a threat to our homeland. We had not been attacked in that way prior.”

Traffic Officer John Zeh, for instance, is just one of six in his department trained to inspect big rigs filled with hazardous material that roll into Lynchburg, Va., at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

The job is considered vital to the war on terrorism, particularly for a community of 65,000 that sits near a nuclear facility. But for the last 18 months, Zeh has been absent, one of thousands of reserve soldiers assigned by the Pentagon to guard military detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“Are these people better off guarding prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, or can they do more service to the country as police officers back in their communities?” asked Lynchburg Police Chief C.W. Bennett, who is struggling to make do with three of his most experienced officers gone or about to go. “We have to make some tough decisions about where these people can do the most good.”

The Pentagon began to build up overseas deployment in December, and almost immediately police and fire departments felt the drain. Even without hard data, it became anecdotally clear that a disproportionate number of reservists were coming from public safety agencies.

“They have been hit heavily,” said Col. Alan Smith, an ombudsman for the reservist support group, who listens to complaints about deployments daily. “When a local reserve unit is mobilized, the members in it most often are called up as a whole, not by ones and twos. And overnight, first-responder agencies can lose 30% of their ability to perform their regular function.”

The loss of personnel to the military is just one more straw on the backs of already beleaguered agencies, several experts said.

Police and fire departments have been asked since the Sept. 11 attacks to do more with less, taking on threat assessments, providing greater police presence at vulnerable sites, training in bioterrorism, mastering radiation detection. And the expanded duties came at a time of low staffing and deep budget cuts.

A recent survey of 8,500 fire departments conducted by the International Assn. of Fire Chiefs showed nearly three-fourths have staff in the reserves -- from firefighters to the chiefs themselves.

A similar poll of more than 2,100 law enforcement agencies by the Police Executive Research Forum found that 44% have lost personnel to call-ups.

Larger organizations can compensate for the depletion in their ranks. Of the 3,000 uniformed personnel in the Los Angeles County Fire Department, for example, just 16 are reservists; seven of those have been activated and only one has shipped out, Deputy Chief Gilbert Herrera said.

Of the Los Angeles Police Department’s more than 9,000 sworn officers, about 500 are in the reserves, and the department is still tallying how many have been activated, a spokesman said.

But smaller departments struggle. Officials say approximately 80% of law enforcement agencies in the country have 20 or fewer sworn officers, and the loss of one or two can leave gaps in their ability to serve their communities.

As more officers and firefighters are sent on military missions for a year or longer, chiefs make do with “smoke and mirror” measures -- paying overtime that is not budgeted, restricting vacations, shifting personnel and scaling back on crime prevention, inspections and other nonemergency services.

Asked in the survey how they would handle staffing losses, the written responses from fire officials around the country ranged from confident to desperate:

“We will maintain the same staffing level even if we must work personnel and pay them overtime.”

“It will only affect one firefighter -- but he is the only other full-time member besides myself.”

“Overtime eliminated and positions frozen. HELP!”

Even in larger departments, the deployment of one key uniformed officer can siphon off valuable expertise. Among those recently sent out are Pasadena Police Chief Bernard Melekian and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Capt. Sid Heal, an internationally recognized expert in SWAT team operations.

While even a chief is expendable for a short while, a long-term absence poses a strain.

“You can do the job without one for a while, but eventually you get an erosion,” said Phillip Romeo, chief of the Eaton Police Department in Illinois, who recently returned from a year of reserve duty. “Officers need to know their chief is there leading all the time.”

Unlike the last large-scale mobilization for the Persian Gulf War, there is no discernible end to the war on terrorism. Many assignments are approaching two years. Back home, as vacations are frozen and overtime imposed, police and fire officials worry about burnout.

“If you’re understaffed to begin with, chances are people are already working overtime to fill in for the full-time people they don’t have. It’s a domino effect,” said Gerard Murphy, senior research associate at the Police Research Forum in Washington.

While the private sector can turn to part-time help, experienced police officers and firefighters are an increasingly precious commodity.

Every new recruit takes about a year to train. And law enforcement agencies say they are already suffering from a shortage of sworn officers, some of them drawn to the private sector, where newly created homeland security jobs pay significantly more than most small cities do.

“If you lose an accountant, you can go out and hire an accountant who would be up to speed and working in a couple of weeks. With police officers, you can’t just plug somebody in and take up the slack,” said Chief Bennett of the Lynchburg, Va., police.

With two of his hazardous material inspectors gone, Bennett said other aspects of police work have given way. Response time to nonemergency calls is longer, and there is less time for the sort of community policing designed to settle citizen disputes before they escalate.

“We get a guy who says I’m getting called up and three days later he’s gone,” Bennett said. “We’ve got court appearances and schedules and all that is out the window. There is no argument, no debate, no saying, ‘How about taking somebody else?’ There is none of that.”

There is a growing concern at the Pentagon that the system on which the reserves was built 30 years ago -- “you’re called, you go” -- no longer works with prolonged absences and homeland security part of the new defense equation.

“We have to change. We have to balance,” said Col. Smith, the reservist group ombudsman. His office averages 500 calls a week, twice the number that came in before the Pentagon began ramping up for war.

Defense officials are concerned that reenlistments and recruitment could suffer if call-ups come too often and the sacrifice of service is perceived as too great.

When it comes to mobilizing reserves, the Defense Department mantra has moved from “just in case” to “just in time,” said Capt. Buechner of the reservist group. “We need to only take people when we absolutely need them, put them exactly where they’re needed and release them as soon as humanely possible.”

But that has been a virtual impossibility in a military with seven reserve branches ill-equipped to communicate with one another. As a result, one unit might be called up repeatedly while a similar unit two counties over is not summoned at all, Buechner said.

The Pentagon is working to establish a central database that will require reservists to list their employers and give the military a better picture of where its troops are coming from, and who can best be spared.

In the meantime, police and fire officials have voiced overwhelming support for the national defense effort, despite the sacrifice in their own ranks. Few complain publicly unless they are asked, and virtually all of them vow to find some way to manage.

“We suck it up,” one chief wrote in response to the recent survey. “It’s a real problem, but it’s the patriotic thing to do.”