We are like neighborhood ghosts. In it, but not of it. Any attachment that we may have to this community could go away at any moment with a transfer or a promotion, but in many ways, we are the eyes and ears of the neighborhood. We’re up at all hours - prowling the streets. We’re in the liminal spaces between shopping centers and water treatment facilities. We know who the drug dealers are. The dog fighting operations. The junkies and thieves. We’ve investigated the garbage bags full of body parts thrown in the canal. Nothing human, just headless goats and chickens. Santeria stuff.
We know when a bad batch of heroin hits the streets. It starts with early morning OD’s near the Twistee Treat (where the dealers deliver to their connections), and the ripples spread further and deeper into the neighborhoods, moving out from the street-level junkies and homeless addicts to the recreational users, club kids, and first-timers. By evening, we’ll be running OD’s at suburban family reunions in clean, well-kept houses with sparkling tile floors and the ever-present smell of Fabuloso in the air.
Our new truck has a pull cord for the air horn just like an old semi, so when the kids give you the old tug-tug-of-the-arm gesture from the side of the road (how can that gesture even hold any meaning for them now?) you can actually pull the cord above your head and give them a good toot of the horn. Wait until you’re past them though. They know not what they ask for. That horn is loud and if you honk it when you’re right next to them, you’ll scare the shit out of them.
We watch our homeless regulars crossing the street with careless abandon. Dewey in his wheelchair, Jose with the cast on his leg, Helen and all her umbrellas. I pulled over one morning on my way to the station to tell Roger that if he kept running in traffic like that, we were going to be picking him up off the road. Still, two days later, we were picking his body up off the road.
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What I have been giving you so far are the highlights. Heroism. Adventure. Gore. Tragedy. Humor. So, how to convey the rest – in fact the majority – of what we do? Boredom. Sleeplessness. Frustration. Repetition. Wasted resources.
I’m always amazed at how many conservative Republican firefighters there are. Hardcore conservative Republican card-carrying union member public servants who provide free socialized medicine to anyone who asks for it as part of their taxpayer-funded pension-generating government jobs. It doesn’t make any more sense in real life than it does when I write it down. But I guess it’s as natural as teenagers hating their parents. And sitting in judgement of those you have sworn to protect is a defense mechanism that allows you to separate yourself from them. You can tell yourself that “those people” asked for the fates that befell them – that these things could never happen to you or your family.
As an officer in the fire service, I often have discussions with my crew members about what it takes to do our jobs effectively, ethically, and compassionately. I probably initiate these discussions more often than the average tough-guy firefighter would like. Well, that’s too bad, I guess.
There has been a lot of discussion lately about what makes cops and firefighters different, and I will admit that I think the differences are vast, but the truth is that we still have a lot in common - sometimes even more than I would like to admit. I find myself speaking to my firefighters about the stark contrasts between the two professions in an attempt to impress upon them the idea that the job of the firefighter is fundamentally different from the job of the police officer. I know I’ve said to them in some of my shorter-tempered moments “if you want to be a cop, go be a cop somewhere else.” While cops share many of the same traits as firefighters (unionized, public sector, government employees with pensions), it just makes sense to me, and a lot of other people, that they would be Republicans.
Firefighting and law enforcement are both dangerous, stressful, PTSD-inducing occupations. They two often work side-by-side, so each side tends to think that they have a little insight into the mentality of the other. And despite what the general public may think about the people who do these jobs, both jobs are performed by flawed, vulnerable, weak human beings who are, by and large, just as afraid as anyone else. First responders worry about their own safety and the safety of their families. They buy too much insurance, and they pay for ridiculous extended warranties. More than a few of them stock up on guns and alarm systems. Many live in gated communities and send their kids to private schools - working overtime and second jobs to pay for it all.
I spent the first half of my life as an itinerant artist and musician, and I can tell you that in comparison to the average first responder, most artists don’t do any of those things. Some of that is just plain old obliviousness, but a good portion of it comes down to actual courage. I can think of a thousand ways in which artists and musicians are more courageous than cops and firefighters. Artists work for little to no money, often without healthcare and certainly without pensions, for very little recognition and with tremendous exposure to risk. I never had a little kid wave at me from the side of the road when I was an artist driving a beat-up pickup truck around the neighborhood. I never had anyone look at me with admiration and offer to pay for my food when I showed up at the grocery store, covered in soot from my welding job.
Some of the hypervigilance seen on the part of first responders is a natural response to the chaos of the job, but the constant, low-level terror that lives just beneath the surface for all of us is the fact that terrible things can and do happen to good people all the time. We’ve seen it happen over and over again. And the thought of just how seemingly random the universe can be, coupled with the images of what we have witnessed over the years can, sometimes, just be too much to bear. So, we armor ourselves in any way that we can find. With uniforms and rituals, with superstition and religion, with guns and alarms, with cameras and gates - but also with alcohol, and drugs, and sex, and violence. And contempt.
Every occupation has its natural adversary, and the tried-and-true response towards that adversary, in any profession, has always been contempt. Bartenders hate drunks, mail carriers hate dogs, artists hate Republicans. The story is as old as time. Firefighters just got lucky in that our adversary, for the most part, is utterly contemptible. Nobody likes house fires. Nobody likes car accidents. Nobody likes heart attacks. And when we save our contempt for our actual adversaries, we end up doing just fine. The problem comes when we start to mistake the people who are our customers for the forces which are our adversaries - we begin to view the people that we have sworn to protect as the cause of our problems. “I had to get up in the middle of the night because of some homeless guy” or “I got puked on because that guy’s a drunk”. It’s easy for us to attach human faces to what are often systemic problems and then blame those particular humans for the larger problems of which they are merely a symptom.
The next step on this slippery slope is when we begin to use our contempt of the individual as a shield with which to protect ourselves from the harsh realities of the job. In order to separate ourselves from the random cruelty of the universe, we have to define ourselves as being somehow different, separate, or better than the people that we see terrible things happening to every day. We can’t bear the thought that the next dead kid could be ours, and we can’t spare the compassion necessary to fully grieve each passing, so we shield ourselves with contempt. “That guy wouldn’t have gotten shot if he hadn’t resisted.” “Those kids wouldn’t be dead if their parents gave a shit about them.” “That patient may have had a ‘poor outcome’, but it doesn’t matter because he was a scumbag.” This is the essence of protective contempt.
I find myself coming back to this idea repeatedly because it’s one of the few approaches that actually gets through to grizzled old (or jaded young) firefighters - and the argument goes something like this: “You can use that ‘protective contempt’ to shield yourself from the things about this job that you don’t want to think about, and it will make you, at best, a poor firefighter. And, the truth is, you might not even care about that. But here’s something you probably do care about: eventually, as you rise through the ranks, your customers are no longer going to be members of the general public. As a leader of this organization, the people you serve – your customers - are increasingly going to be your subordinates. Meanwhile, all you have done for the last twenty years is cultivate an attitude of contempt towards your customers. You’ve clung to the idea that the customer is always wrong, and now, when you only have one tool in your toolbox, those customers are your brothers and sisters. Remember those people you said you would lay down your life for? Now you’ve turned your contempt against them and become the kind of leader that you were just bitching about not five minutes ago. You really want to be like that guy? Keep doing what you’re doing because this is how you end up there.”
I’ve seen quite a few looks of humble recognition on firefighter’s faces at the end of that discussion.
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I’m not going to go so far as to give modern-day fire departments credit for being forward-thinking and flexible. The old saying “three hundred years of tradition, unimpeded by progress” is still, sadly, true in a lot of cases. But in many ways, it is the long-standing traditions of the fire house and its culture that make firefighting the rare public occupation able to maintain its focus on the people being served without succumbing (as much) to the usual concerns of efficiency, economy, and profit. Part of this may be sheer practicality. If someone had found a way to save money and by letting poor people’s houses burn, I’m sure that we would have tried that approach. The problem is that fires have a nasty habit of spreading when they’re left unchecked, and rich people’s houses tend to burn just as hot, if not hotter, than poor people’s houses.
There are, however, two critical ways in which the modern fire service has been able to adapt to the changing times in ways that police departments could learn something from. For one thing, within the last fifty years, fire departments have learned about the importance of fire prevention and we have made it our job – not a job for another agency. In 1977, the number of per capita fire deaths in the US was about three times what it is today (32 deaths per 1M population in 1977 vs 11 deaths per 1M population in 2020), and the total number of fires has decreased in similar fashion. This has largely been due to increased safety standards, more stringent building and electrical codes, increased inspections, alarm systems, sprinkler systems, improved municipal water systems, and faster fire department response times. Most, if not all, of these changes have been spearheaded by fire departments and national safety agencies like the NFPA, often with incredible resistance from those who would stand to lose considerable amounts of money from more stringent safety standards, most notably the housing industry. Today our inspectors save more lives than our front-line firefighters ever will. By focusing on prevention, we’ve done the one thing that most public agencies are loathe to do – we’ve decreased the demand for our services. The total number of actual fire calls in the U.S. today is half of what it was thirty years ago, even with the near 50% increase in population. Medical calls, on the other hand, have gone in the opposite direction.
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Fire department calls for medical assistance are almost five times what they were thirty years ago. This is where the fire service saw an opportunity for itself, and fire departments around the country were able to capitalize on the changing dynamic of emergency services. It wasn’t by any means a foregone conclusion that fire departments should take on EMS services – it doesn’t really even make sense on the face of it – and people still ask us all the time why a fire truck shows up when someone is having a heart attack. The answer is because our fire trucks are full of firefighters who are cross-trained as paramedics, and the systems for delivering those medics rapidly throughout our neighborhoods were already in place, so we chose to take advantage of them. We also managed to save money for municipalities that were paying for both fire and EMS services separately, all while increasing our own salaries substantially and improving patient care and response times. But it didn’t come easy. It required a serious culture change. The department that I work for merged its fire and EMS services in 1997 and we are still feeling the pains of it today.
So, what does all of this have to do with policing? It’s simple. Compared to the firefighter’s adversary, the cop’s foe is just easier to anthropomorphize. It’s clear that, over the years, policing in America has begun to mistake customers for adversaries. What seems like a small distinction is actually a critical difference – the difference between fighting crime and fighting “criminals”. Just about anyone can identify a crime in progress – there is rarely any doubt about what’s happening. But how do you identify a “criminal”? Implicit bias? Stereotypes? Racism? Contempt? The answer is that you don’t – or at least you shouldn’t. It’s not a cop’s job to identify criminals. Cops are there to identify crimes that have been committed and, on rare occasions, to interrupt their commission or to stop them from happening in the first place. Cops fight crime not criminals. Criminals are made in a court of law.
Most of us know that punishment as a deterrent to crime doesn’t really work all that well. In fact, this argument is central to those who would advocate for defunding or disbanding police departments in their current form. So, if we have recognized that deterrence is not helping in the streets, why would we think it would help within the institution? We can create all the civilian review boards we want, enact duty to intervene laws, we can put body cameras on every cop in America, and it’s not going to change much of anything.
I have to say that I’ve been surprised by the amount of resistance I’ve encountered every time I’ve suggested that the only way to solve the problems that we are facing today is through training and intentional culture creation (also intentional culture destruction when those cultures are toxic). I think a lot of the resistance comes from the natural desire to give the enemy a face – the same miscalculation that we have already identified as being a problem on the part of the police (or the fire department, or anyone else). This is Lenny Bruce’s classic argument about people’s inability to separate “The Authority” from “The People With the Authority Vested In Them”. At the same time that we are decrying the ills of systemic racism and the seemingly permanent stain that it has left on our fragile democracy, we have been unable to separate the people committing these atrocities from the institutions that made them what they are. I know this because many of you have probably already decided that this is an apology piece for the police (“copologia” as we have come to call it), when I have not even begun to discuss the institution of policing. I’ve just been talking about cops, and cops are just people. They’re flawed and scared and stupid and racist just like a lot of people (they are also selfless and compassionate and dedicated like a lot of other people). Are there bad ones? Of course. Are there a lot of bad ones? Probably. But don’t fool yourself into thinking that getting rid of the bad ones will solve any of the problems we are currently experiencing. Those bad cops were made by the system that put them in power, a system that promptly turned its back when they abused that power. And as long as that system exists in its current form, we’ll just continue to create more and more bad cops. How could we not?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that the current crop of murderers shouldn’t be punished. In fact, I think cops (or firefighters, or other public servants) who murder, or otherwise abuse their power, should be punished more than the average guy on the street - because they have broken a sacred pact. We entrusted them with our safety, allowing ourselves to be vulnerable in their presence, and they chose to violate that trust. At the very least, I think these bad cops should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. And then I think we should change the laws. And the culture. And the incentives.
If we have learned anything from these last few, rudderless years, it’s that what I’ve been telling my son all along is true. One-third of the population is made up of genuinely good people who have the well-being and interests of their fellow travelers at heart. They truly want to make the world a better place, and they’ll do whatever it takes to make that happen. Fully another third of the population are simply horrible monsters. It pains me to say it, but it’s true. And the last third is just along for the ride. They could go either way. But we can teach them to be good people. We can model acceptable behaviors, and if we can get them to go along with us, we’ll have the monsters outnumbered by two to one. The numbers are never going to get any better than that.
And the monsters never stop working, either. Like wolves, they prowl our perimeter, picking off our most vulnerable members, always ready to enter our circle and sow their seeds of destruction. But we can continue to guide the conversation, to lead by example, and to exert one of the most powerful forces we have at our disposal – peer pressure. In the last few years, I’ve seen the same meme repeated over and over. The basic statement reads something like “I can’t believe I have to tell you not to be a horrible person”. But still, we do. And we have to say it over and over again because the horrible people don’t just go away. They are always there waiting for an opportunity to strike, and all we need to do is to hand them the microphone for the briefest amount of time and we can see our numbers start to dwindle. And right now, the sides are about as evenly split as they have ever been. The scales could easily tip past the point of redemption. We are currently in a pitched battle, and it seems to me that the moral arc of the universe is beginning to bend back towards justice. It doesn’t bend on its own, though. Sometimes you’ve really gotta lean on that fucker.
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