Police & Fire

Am I the only person who is annoyed by the barrage of over-blown sentiment for 9/11 first responders?  Don't misunderstand me, 9/11 was indeed tragic for all of the victims and their families.  I expect that the police and fire department employees that died were hard working and conscientious folks, but this effort to anoint them with sainthood is a sham.  The parroting of their virtue has become nothing more than a tool for movers and shakers to generate a sympathetic response from the public for products, charities, political aims and TV shows.  

This first responder bandwagon reminds me of the red menace of the 1950s.  They both are an unabashed, in-your-face, old-fashioned form of arm twisting that's been  wrapped in the American flag.  The first responders were not the first and only American workers that lost their lives while on the job.  In 2010, 29 miners perished in an explosion at the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia.  There was no similar effort to glorify these victims since the axis of evil had nothing to do with the disaster.  

All of this hats off, hand-over-your-heart, first responder worship is a welcome distraction for the police and firefighter's unions to draw attention away from the fact that their compensation packages are helping bankrupt nearly every city in America.  Most civil service jobs exist as a means for the state and local governments to collect money.  Property assessors, meter readers, parking attendants, business license clerks, DMV clerks, building permit clerks, etc., all support a system that levies and collects fees from citizens.  These jobs have difficulty defending egregious salaries and benefits since they can only claim that service levels will suffer.  Since existing service levels are already at their lowest conceivable point, any decline would be hard to detect.

Public safety jobs on the other hand have successfully inflated their benefits for decades by threatening the lives of the average citizen.  Fire Department sham ploy:  Who will pull your child from their burning bedroom? 

It might be useful to consider the idea that we may have allowed this whole fire fighting thing to get way out of hand.  It has been a hundred years since cities stopped burning to the ground every 10 years.  We no longer build everything out of raw lumber.  Building codes, construction methods and new materials have virtually eliminated any chance that the average person will experience being in a fire during their lifetime.  Why then do we have to maintain a full-time compliment of equipment and staff adequate to deal with a city-wide conflagration? 

Years ago I was conducting training programs for city fire departments in Southern California.  The Fire Chief for the City of El Segundo told me a major justification for the expense of the training was to fight boredom.  He told me that during the previous 12 months they had only a single fire to respond to, and it was a detached garage.  They employed 90 firefighters full time and replaced all pumper and hook and ladder trucks every 3-4 years.  The City of El Segundo has some defense and oil business properties that pose a risk but each of these maintains its own fire suppression staff and equipment whose capabilities far exceed those of the city. 

The cost of fire service compensation has rarely ever been questioned.  God forbid that anyone asks why fire fighters working 48-72 hour shifts are paid while they sleep.  Why isn't the time being paid to sleep discounted when determining overtime pay?  What private sector business offers full retirement after 20 years with a minimum of 80% of an employee's highest salary? 

Here's a concept to consider:  the next time a Walmart store, a vacant lot, a wilderness area, a strip mall or a block of warehouses catches fire – let it burn.  If it's a single residence it particularly makes sense to let it burn to the ground.  It will reduce the cost of demolition and after the home is rebuilt, the homeowner/consumer will proceed to spent lots of money filling it back up with crap during the next 20 years.  It's good for the economy.

I pay for fire insurance and my taxes pay for the fire department – why in God's name do I need both?  Why is this not duplication?

Police Department sham ploy:  It is a dangerous job, who else will protect you from a slayer/rapist/robber?

I am hopeful that the police can arrest the bad guys after the fact.  I don't think it is accurate or realistic to expect them to catch criminals in the act, let alone eliminate crime altogether.  Unlike the fire department, unfortunately there is a valid need for the police.  The issue is not their usefulness but rather the manner in which their unions have used extortion to gain compensation packages from elected officials with total disregard for the city's future survival.

No one's denying there's danger in police work but there's millions of workers who face greater risk.  Workers in fishing, logging, aeronautics, roofing, mining, farming, trucking, various types of construction, and refuse collection experience on-the-job fatality rates as much as 11 times greater than police officers.  None of the employees in these other industries enjoy retirement benefits that are remotely comparable to what police receive.  It's no surprise since unlike the police, workers in these other industries can't launch a political threat that will unseat management.