Double-Duty Public Safety Officers Seen as Way to Save Funds : Cop on Beat May Be Firefighter as More Cities Consolidate Departments

The roles of police officer and firefighter have become blurred in scores of U.S. cities where the men and women in blue must know how to aim a fire hose as well as a firearm.

Although people who perform both duties are common in small, rural or suburban areas, experts say larger, more urban communities are scrapping the traditional separation of police officer and firefighter in favor of creating a new job known as public safety officer.

In Michigan last month , the Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe Park decided to train firefighters to be police officers and vice versa, and the Battle Creek City Commission appointed a committee to look into combining the two departments.

“The level of interest in it has increased dramatically,” said Ken Francis, director of the National Public Safety Director’s Assn. and the public safety chief in Gladstone, Mo.

“Right now, there’s probably 100 to 150 communities that have the total, consolidated departments,” he said. “But in the last five years, probably 500 to 1,000 communities in the country have begun looking at it.”

Holds Down Costs

The ability to increase police and fire protection without increasing costs has been the main reason why “public safety consolidation” has become a municipal catch phrase in the 1980s, said Robert Trojanowicz, head of Michigan State University’s criminal justice department.

“It has been a trend,” he said. “And it’s probably going to be even more emphasized in the future because of decreasing budgets in a majority of American cities.”

However, the concept may not work in large cities, Trojanowicz said, mainly because of the number of fires and numerous tall buildings that require a specialized, full-time department.

Critics of the trend, most notably the 160,000-member International Assn. of Firefighters, say the professions don’t mix and that fire protection is ultimately subordinated to police protection.

Officials in Kalamazoo, a southwestern Michigan city of 80,000 people, faced a court action and bitter union negotiations before the first group of employees entered “cross-training” in 1982.

By mid-July, the last group of firefighters and police officers will have been trained and assigned to their dual-role duties, said City Manager Sheryl Sculley.

40 Refuse Training

She contends that the program has been a success, despite the lingering acrimony of the 40 firefighters who have refused to learn police duties. The 40 have been allowed to remain in their jobs, mainly as drivers and equipment operators.

“Four or five years ago we received a number of complaints from people about never seeing an officer on the street,” she said. “We don’t get those complaints anymore.”

In 1980, the departments had 383 employees; the newly merged operation has 298. Meanwhile, the number of patrol cars on the street has more than tripled, from eight to 28.

Also, average response time for fires is 20 seconds faster because of the extra manpower, she said.

She said the key to boosting manpower is eliminating the time firefighters spend in their stations waiting for fire calls.

John Gannon, president of the International Assn. of Firefighters, said the nation’s largest firefighter union is convinced that consolidation is unworkable and doomed to failure.

Crime Up, Morale Down

“We have numerous cases where it’s shown to be ineffective,” he said. “Crime has risen, morale has gone down, fire protection suffers.”

Whether the consolidation of the two traditionally separate services will work depends on the community, said Garry Briese, executive director of the International Assn. of Fire Chiefs. He notes that Durham, N.C., recently scrapped its decade-old system.

Briese also said that police officers and firefighters didn’t work well together.

“I don’t think you can mix the personality traits,” he said. “The traditional law enforcement officer works very well in a military structure. The firefighter goes into it primarily to save lives, not to come down in a law enforcement capacity.

“The public safety concept is a good concept, except when we include the human factor.”

Francis disagrees.

“I don’t think you could recognize a difference,” he said. “The days when you recruited the biggest, meanest guy to be a police officer went out 20 years ago.”

Firefighters Resistant

Firefighters are probably most resistant to the change because they have to give up the 24-hour shifts that allow them to have large blocks of days off, said Robert Siefert, public safety chief in the Detroit suburb of Oak Park, which merged its departments in 1954.

“As long as there are remaining firefighters in Kalamazoo, I expect we’ll hear how the system is not working,” he said. “They fight so hard to hang onto those 24-hour days. It’s purely economic. Being a firefighter is almost a secondary occupation for many of them.”

Briese said the time a firefighter spends not fighting fires is not wasted.

“A 24-hour schedule is a jealously guarded schedule, there’s no question about that,” he said. “But if a firefighter is doing his job, that time is going to be utilized. The days of firefighters sitting around playing checkers are long gone.”

Mary Gibala, a researcher with the Washington-based firefighters association, said the union was studying the number of merged departments nationwide.

“I know it’s up to epidemic proportions,” she said. “I do know in Michigan it tends to be more prevalent than anywhere else in the country.”

Sunnyvale a Model

The department that experts most often cite as the model of combined departments is in Sunnyvale, Calif., a city of 115,000 people that adopted the concept 36 years ago.

City Manager Tom Lecock said six to 10 groups from other cities visit Sunnyvale to study the system every year. He also receives more than 50 inquiries and requests for information annually.

In Sunnyvale, personnel are trained in both roles, but alternate between two years of police patrol and one year of firehouse duty.

“We are capable of putting more law enforcement people on a crime scene and more fire people on a fire scene than separate departments,” he said.

He said nationwide interest picked up in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when states began passing tax-cutting propositions, such as California’s Proposition 13. Communities with dwindling revenues sought ways to improve police and fire protection without increasing costs.