The Truth about “Public Safety”, Part 6: PSOs - A Dying Breed
Excerpts from “PSOs - A Dying Breed? - Reassessing the Validity of Public Safety Officers for Fire/Police Response”, by Alan Saly, Firehouse magazine, August 1988

This past November, a 30-year program of consolidated fire/police protection ended in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. After a unanimous vote by the city aldermen, the public safety officer program (PSO), which had combined the fire and police departments, was rescinded, and 51 new firefighters were hired to “free the police department of its commitment to providing a substantial level of actual fire-suppression support in fire scene operations.” For one of the largest integrated public safety operations in America, an experiment in management was over.

Says Fire Chief lester Ervin: “The whole public safety program started out as a political decision. Conversely, it was a political decision to get out of the program; a decision that the elected officials made. Knowing firefighters and police officers, everybody will want to take credit (for killing the program), but the best way to describe it is to say that it was a political decision when PSO was born and a political decision when it died.”

Today, the fire department is ecstatic to have new members. Says Ervin: “We now have the opportunity to do the things we do best”. He believes that as a result of the decision to go back to separate police and fire departments, fire-response times will improve, as will the fire department’s ability to handle non-fire-suppression activities.

With a population of 147,000 people in an area of 71 square miles, Winston-Salem is an industrial city. Even under the public safety regime, Winston-Salem maintained separate fire and police departments, but only skeleton crews (total staff of nine, two per shift) were kept at fire stations. Public safety officers, generally operating as part of the police department, would respond to incidents the small fire crews couldn’t handle. These PSOs carried turnout gear in the trunks of their patrol cars. Each member received 13 weeks of fire training and 24 weeks of police instruction.
The nearby city of Durham, North Carolina, had a fully integrated PSO department (also, until recently). In Durham, there were no fire or police officers, as such. Instead, public safety officers, with dual fire and police training, were quartered in both fire and police stations, ready to respond as needed.

Putting a PSO program in place usually is done by a city manager or other administrator who believes he can save the public’s money without sacrificing quality police/fire service. The argument that public safety officers can do double duty usually is made at the expense of fire department operations. For example, administrator Louis H. Schimmel, Jr., the court-appointed receiver for the City of Escorse, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit - and a city in budgetary crisis - was quoted in a local newspaper saying that the fire service needed reform: “The fire department in Escorse (a city of 14,500) is truly the Achilles’ heel. That’s the one primary area that I’m looking at to save money. You have a lot of people there who don’t have much to do all day except now and then go on an ambulance run,” he said about the department’s 19 paid members. “Today, I don’t care if it’s Escorse or elsewhere, you can’t afford that much idle time.”

Besides saying that most firefighters are idle much of the time, PSO advocates make another assumption that many would disagree with: that fire and police work can be done effectively by the same individual - provided there is enough time available and that the individual’s psychological makeup would pose no obstacle.

For John Granito, associate editor of Chief Fire Executive and co-author of the International City Management Association’s (ICMA) “Green Book,” Managing Fire Services, fire department “idle time” indicates not that the department needs replacement, but that it needs professionalization. “If you want a real fire department that does fire prevention and provides special services, you can’t make [PSO] work,” says he. “Any modern [paid] fire department that’s doing its job has its firefighters working from the moment they come on shift to the time they leave, except if they have to sleep.”

The argument for PSO programs in smaller communities, Granito says, goes like this: “Small towns define fire work simply as fire suppression. The necessity for fire suppression is so infrequent that firefighters are terribly under-occupied. Consequently, a person can be a police officer and occasionally will be called to fight a fire. And, since most fires are extinguished by extinguishers, booster-lines or 3/4” lines, a police officer can cope with them. And, the research shows that most small-town fire departments lose the big ones anyway.”

He replies to his own argument with a counterpoint: “You’re cheating. You’re not providing comprehensive fire safety and rescue services to the community.

“ Police work is ongoing,” he continues. “Police are working when they’re on patrol. A police officer seated in his car on the highway is working: he’s looking at license numbers, looking at people, checking radar. You can’t do fire prevention, rescue and EMS work, and work as a police officer at the same time.”

According to the International City Management Association, which keeps fire and police statistics for city administrators, only 188 U.S. communities practice one form or another of fire/police consolidation, although the interest in PSO remains strong on the part of administrators. The ICMA found the majority of PSO departments are in communities under 25,000 in population (153 of 188), and half are in cities with fewer than 10,000 people.

Not all consolidated departments are the same. The ICMA identifies five distinct kinds of consolidated operations, which include:
* Full consolidation, in which the police and fire services have been fully combined into a department of public safety (Local example - Kingsford. - ed.) Officers perform both public safety functions and usually are identified as public safety officers (PSOs). A minimum number of PSOs is assigned to duty in the fire station, while the remaining officers patrol, performing fire prevention activities and police patrol duties.
*Partial consolidation, in which the identities of the police and fire services are retained and a special patrol is created to perform combined police/fire duties. This special patrol usually is composed of personnel recruited from both departments. Such officers are called PSOs and, when not engaged in firefighting activities, are under the control of the police department.
*Selected area consolidation, in which the police and fire services function separately except for specially trained police/firefighters assigned to combined duties in a specific geographical area.
*Functional consolidation, in which separate police and fire services are retained, but one or more duties normally performed by one department are assigned to members of the other (Local example - Iron Mountain - ed.) For example, firefighters may help with administrative tasks in the police station, or police officers may prepare hydrants for hoses at the fire scene prior to the arrival of apparatus.
* Nominal or administrative consolidation, in which both services retain individual and distinct identities operationally (and sometimes administratively), but both are under one public safety director (Local example - Menominee - ed.)

The ICMA says that of the departments it could identify, 46 were fully consolidated, with most of the rest having either functional or nominal consolidation.

According to a report by Centaur Associates, efforts to consolidate fire and police departments peaked in the 1970s, with successful attempts rare in the 80’s, though many communities continue to study and debate proposals. Consolidation, the report notes, is opposed widely and has had a considerable number of failures (written before PSO was abandoned in Winston-Salem and Durham, two of the largest communities that had PSO departments, the Centaur report cites 29 communities in 10 states that have abandoned it, amounting to one-third of the total population covered in 1980 by consolidated departments).

Consolidation also is opposed, the report notes, by fire service professional organizations, including the International Association of Fire Chiefs (IAFC), International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) and the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA). The concept is also opposed by the Insurance Services Office (ISO). These organizations make widely cited points against consolidation, including that it breaks up teamwork among members of a company, lowers morale and often does not save the money expected.

The classic operational argument against PSO - what happens if the bad guys start a fire on one side of town and rob a bank on the other - often is invoked.

When a skeleton fire crew responds (such as in the public safety department of Fairfield, California), the suppression job may be done in most cases, but the stakes are high. In Fairfield, only two members respond as an engine company - a captain and an engineer. As public safety officers, their job is to provide a quick knockdown, if at all possible. They use automatic nozzles that can regulate pumping pressure. If they aren’t able to handle the fire, both volunteer firefighters, who are paid on call, and additional public safety officers, who may be patrolling as a police unit, will respond. By that time it may be too late. (Editor’s note - this is likely the type of arrangement being examined for Iron Mountain, Kingsford, Breitung Township, and Norway).
In conclusion, the Centaur report notes that “the trend seems to be toward a slowdown in the number of new communities opting for consolidated fire/police departments. It is significant that this slowdown has come during a period when communities have been particularly active in identifying and adopting alternative methods of providing public services that, it is hoped, will reduce or at least stabilize public spending”.

That PSO is finding less support is also, in part, due to some widely publicized PSO failures - such as in Peoria, Illinois, and Daytona Beach, Florida, where PSO consolidation actually cost the cities more money than they had been spending on separate police and fire operations.

Addressing the central PSO issue - whether substantial fire department “idle time” exists, Winston-Salem Chief Ervin says: “Any progressive fire chief is working to develop programs to address a full range of areas besides fire suppression - going from waiting for something to happen to doing something before it happens. One of our most important and satisfying programs has been a smoke detector campaign. We went into every household in the community, advised residents how to install them and even assisted in installation. We’re heavily involved in fire education. We have a fourth-grade fire education program in the entire school system. We do fire safety education programs for anybody who will listen; community groups are our forte. We’re not involved in EMS, but we’re the lead agency in hazardous materials response. (Just like Iron Mountain WAS, before the 2004 layoffs. - ed.)

"PSO is one of those trends that is governed by the economy. If a city manager is looking at ways to address the budget, consolidation will come up. But I do not believe it can be more effective than separate police and fire departments, ” concludes Ervin.