Police Fire Wars Continue

There has been another skirmish in the Police-Fire Wars, the battle over who is in charge at emergency scenes. This time the skirmish occurred in a most unlikely place: California, the birth place of ICS, the system that was supposed to solve these types of territorial disputes.

On February 15, 2010, Presidents day, a Montecito Fire Protection District battalion chief was handcuffed and arrested by a California Highway Patrol officer at an accident scene on a crowded highway. The officer apparently took offense that the chief refused to move fire apparatus to allow traffic to flow more freely. This exact factual scenario has been at the heart of other high profile police-fire confrontations, including:

• May, 2003, Fire Captain David Wilson of the Robertson Fire Protection District, Missouri, was arrested after he refused a Hazelwood police officer’s order to move a fire truck parked at the scene of a motor vehicle accident on Interstate 270.

• November, 2006, Deputy Chief Robert Jenkins of the Rockaway Township Fire Department was arrested by a New Jersey State Trooper after he refused to move a fire truck that was blocking the right lane of Route 80 at an accident scene.

The latest incident occurred on Highway 101 Northbound. At the time, the highway was backed up over two miles. The CHiPs officer was justifiably concerned about further contributing to the traffic backup, while the battalion chief was justifiably concerned about the safety of responders. The officer instructed the chief to move the apparatus, and when he refused, he was handcuffed and placed under arrest. The chief was released upon the arrival on scene of a CHiPs supervisor, and the entire matter is under review by the respective agencies.

According to Geri Ventura, a spokesperson for Montecito Fire, CHiPs is the lead agency for highway incidents in California, and the initial CHiPs officer is the initial Incident Commander. While the matter was quickly brought under control with the release of the chief, an underlying issue remains: If the senior official of a responding agency has immediate safety concerns that are ignored by the IC, what should be done – particularly when the IC has the authority to arrest anyone who refuses to comply with his orders?

NIMS ICS has done a great job of preparing various responding agencies to work together at major incidents, and certainly at a major incident such safety concerns could be worked out through the comprehensive incident planning process. However, incidents like the Montecito arrest point out one of the big flaws in the NIMS ICS program: small incident management.

The strength of ICS is that it brings order to chaos at major incidents. Much of the focus on NIMS ICS has been on major incidents, with an assumption that smaller incidents can be handled simply by using a scaled down version of ICS appropriate for the needs to this incident. This assumption more or less trivializes the day to day problems (like firefighters being arrested), in favor of ensuring enough attention is paid to major incident command (Hurricane Katrina). If you have been though ICS 300, 400, 700 and 800 you no doubt understand my point.

Most incidents that police and fire department respond to on a daily basis start and end in a matter of minutes. The focus of NIMS ICS training and direction on handling larger, campaign type incidents that go on for days or weeks, has diverted attention from the types of issues that need to be addressed at smaller type incidents so that questions like this can be resolved once and for all.

The fact that an incident like the Montecito arrest occurred in California in 2010 speaks volumes about how much further we have to go when it comes to ICS.