Police Work Makes Firefighters Appreciate Their Old Line of Work

Thomas Kingsley, a veteran fireman and rookie police officer, runs a finger along the bullets on the gun belt he reluctantly wears each workday.

“I’ll never make a decent cop,” said Kingsley, 43, a firefighter for two decades and police officer since February.

“The other day, I had a child abuse case. There’s welts all over this kid. You’d never see that kind of stuff if you weren’t a cop. You don’t realize what a good job being a fireman is until you do this one.”

Kingsley is one of 298 members of the Kalamazoo Public Safety Department, a controversial hybrid of what was, until 1982, two separate, traditional police and fire departments.

Like scores of other places, this southwestern Michigan city decided to merge its police and fire departments, training personnel from each to perform the duties of the other.

Andres Herrera had been a police officer for 13 years when it became his turn to be trained last year. He recalled riding to his first blaze last November, a house fire, and seeing its orange glow on the horizon.

“You want to talk about a thumping heart. I was scared,” he said.

“It was probably a combination of fear and excitement.

“Ten, 15 minutes later it (the fire) was over.”

George Kalamaras, 42, has been a firefighter for 22 years and vows never to train for police duties. The system in Kalamazoo is disorganized, inefficient and doomed to be replaced by traditional departments, he said.

“We’ll go back,” he said. “There’s no question about it.”