Public Safety Insights Newsletter: How to Provide a Reality Check for Your Community

How to Provide a Reality Check for Your Community
Public Safety Insight:	It’s time for a reality check when available resources prevent you from providing the level of safety your community expects and deserves.

Last week the fire chief of a combination department shared his dilemma with me. An ongoing shortage of volunteers means his agency no longer can provide an acceptable level of service to his community, so he must persuade the town to provide the funds necessary to hire more career members. However, for years the message to the public has emphasized the benefits of a half-volunteer department and downplayed the trade-off of longer response times. How, he wondered, could he both make his case successfully and avoid the perception by politicians and administrators that he was throwing them under the proverbial bus?

"It’s time for a reality check," I said. "Stakeholders must be fully educated about what their fire and rescue department can and cannot do to keep them safe so they can make informed decisions about how to allocate scarce resources. Years of emphasizing financial efficiency without considering the impact on public safety effectiveness have taken their toll. The fact is, you just don’t have the number of firefighters available to provide the level of public safety the community deserves. It’s time to tell them."

Like this fire chief, many of you have reached the point at which you have an obligation to provide a reality check for your stakeholders. Your agencies cannot do their jobs effectively because decision-makers are uninformed about the impact of their resource allocation choices. That’s why it’s critical for you to take on the role of educator. It’s time to pull back the curtain a bit and fully disclose what the public must do so you can keep them safe. Anything less than full and accurate disclosure does a disservice to your community as well as to your employees and volunteers.

Here are some guidelines for providing a reality check:

1. Co-create with stakeholders a clear "big picture" of public safety. Have them tell you what a safe, healthy, economically viable community looks, sounds, and feels like. This creates a sense of ownership of the big picture.

2. Describe accurately what it will take to move from your current reality to the desired future state.

3. Communicate the facts directly and fully, without emotion or judgment. Don’t sugarcoat them, or make promises you won’t be able to keep.

4. Never, ever talk about efficiency without also talking about its impact on public safety effectiveness.

5. Identify multiple options for getting to the community’s desired future state.

6. For every option, articulate clearly its specific consequences for public safety. (Note: saying "People will die" is not specific.)

7. Frame those outcomes in contexts that people can understand and appreciate. Answer their implicit question, "What’s in it for ME?"

8. Keep the focus on the community’s safety, not on your agency.

9. Make it clear that your role is to educate people and give your best advice, and the community’s role is to decide whether to take it.

If you’d like to learn how to educate your community about the impact of resource allocation on public safety and/or how to generate options for their consideration, take a look at the process I developed for the Los Angeles Fire Department. To find other articles and resources that may be of value to you, I invite you to visit my web site at www.PublicSafetyInsights.net.

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©2015 Pat Lynch | Public Safety Insights