Ep 65: Overcoming Obstacles Part 1
Episode 65
Published Jan 29, 2024
Last updated Feb 18, 2026
Duration: 37:10
Episode Summary
There are dozens of reasons not to change, adjust and adapt our training, but who is going to take responsibility after an incident if we don’t work together? Today’s episode examines how we can overcome these obstacles.
Episode Notes
Today we start a discussion on why it’s important to train both sides and establish communication. Bill Godfrey, Pete Kelting and Don Tuten talk about the importance of joint training and building relationships prior to an incident. While responder agencies tend to be somewhat isolated, being open to adjusting your training provides a skill set and confidence in the process that will allow you to move forward.
Watch this episode on YouTube at https://youtube.com/live/2NhKowiY03o
Transcript
Bill Godfrey:We want you to save lives on an active shooter event. And the two obstacles in your way are the bad guy and the clock. And if you've been to any of our training in the last five years, you've heard us say that. Well, it turns out there's a third obstacle. And that's today's topic. Stick around. Welcome to the Active Shooter Incident Management podcast. My name is Bill Godfrey, your podcast host. And I am seated here with Pete Kelting and Don Tuten, two of our other instructors here from C3 Pathways. Thanks for coming in today, guys.
Don Tuten:
Hey, thanks, Bill.
Pete Kelting:
Thanks for having us, Bill
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah, so today we are going to talk about the third obstacle. You know, for years we've been opening our sessions by talking about the two obstacles to saving lives are the bad guy and then the clock. And as we've said many, many times, the truth of the matter is, in most instances across the country, getting the bad guy stopped quickly is generally not the problem we face; it's what happens after that, and rescuing the injured and getting them transported. And so that's why we focus so much on the clock. But it turns out there's a third obstacle. And I'm not sure that we really recognized that or acknowledged it out loud as much as we probably should have. And today I wanna talk about that. And folks, that third obstacle is us. It's us as responders who for whatever reason find reasons not to change, not to adjust, not to adopt. And I'm gonna run through this list.
You guys think that's a good way to start? We'll run through this. So here's some of the things that we've heard said, and there's 38 of 'em, so I'm not gonna read 'em all. But you'll get the general sense of this. "That's not the way we do it around here. We're short-staffed and don't have time to train everyone. That's not ICS- or NIMS-compliant. Changing policy is hard and takes forever. The decision-makers aren't here; they didn't come to the training. There's not enough time or money to train everyone with all the other training requirements we have to meet. We don't have enough people. We don't have enough responders to execute this. We have too many people to execute this. I don't like your terminology. I don't know how or I don't have the authority to change the policy. Our agency is too big to train everyone; it'll take too long. We can't get the other neighboring agencies to make the transition. Police and fire don't have relationships to get everyone to agree to implementation. Higher-ups would never implement this." On and on and on. I think you guys get get the gist of this. I would like to take a number, and they do fall into some categories. I'd like to take a number of these and just kind of talk about why it's so frustrating when this stuff gets in the way, and what some of the overcomes can be. Don, why don't you start us off?
Don Tuten:
Yeah, so, well, first and foremost, when we get called to teach this class, this is a national standard class on response. I mean, this is the model. This is what is taught everywhere in the country. It is one standard all the way around. And being brought into these different agencies and then hearing these, sometimes it's like, well, you had to know, you know, what were coming in to teach you. And you had to know that this was coming up. But the the biggest thing for me, and like Pete, you know, we both come from pretty good-sized agencies. And when we implemented this with the agency that I was from, these same things came up. These same things came up after the training, is, you know, hey, we don't work with the fire department as well. Or this is gonna cost too much money. Or, you know, our policymakers are not here.
But being in the position that I was in with our agency, I was that change agent. And because we did bring this to the agency and we did implement this, it was on me. So as a chief, the first thing I said was: "Okay, well we need to have a meeting with the fire department." Once again, very large agency, very large fire department. We've always worked pretty good together, you know, but always within our own confinements. You know, we talked together, you know, everything was great. But we were still somewhat isolated. So when, you know, about 10 years ago when we started putting this together, you know, I got together with the fire chief and a lot of his underlings and some of the same things came up on their side. And the question that I proposed to them, after about five minutes of going back and forth, was, okay, awesome, who is gonna put their name on this incident? When we do have an incident, Who's gonna accept responsibility since we did not train together? And it was one-
Bill Godfrey:
I'll bet that was a quiet moment.
Don Tuten:
Yeah, well, everybody looks around. And it's a reality check is what it is. Because it's not only for your fire chief, for your law enforcement side, for your mayor, for your county commissioners, it's reality. Because it's not, unfortunately, it's not a matter of when: it's a matter of if. and then this scale obviously is dependent, but it works. So I can just tell you, and I'll go into a little bit of it, but one of the things that we did immediately is we started looking at, okay, how can we implement this, the crawl-walk runway. How can we get everybody on board? And we started with our special events. And that was the easiest way to do. it didn't come overnight. But it did start setting the mindset to diminish these excuses, for lack of better terms, I guess.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah, and I recall, Don, when you guys first started doing this on special events, you had your medical teams married up with a couple of officers assigned and made 'em rescue task forces. I don't remember what you called 'em before, but basically, the security teams that would go do the crowd work; you set them up as contact teams and began socializing these things. But I remember you and Michelle telling some stories about how it wasn't so popular in the very, very beginning with the law enforcement and fire personnel having to spend the game and the assignment together. But that changed, didn't it?
Don Tuten:
It did change. And a lot of it changed on the law enforcement side, because we started mandating the ICS classes within our agency. We started going to an all-response where fire department and law enforcement started working together. And quite honestly, as we started training our younger supervisors coming up, it became the norm. So anytime you have any change where you have people that have been in one position for a long time, you know, what are the two things that cops and firemen hate, is the way that we're doing it now: and change. So we understood a long time ago that it wasn't gonna, you know, turning a battleship, you're not gonna turn it overnight. But at the same token, by putting these, you know, by putting this program into place, by working together, by giving everybody a responsibility, it started, if anything, it raised conversation. And by raising the conversation and the what-ifs, and they were valued on both sides, fire, and police, it started to close that gap on this is how we've always done it.
Bill Godfrey:
That's a great story. Pete, as Don mentioned, you're also from a law enforcement agency, pretty good size, not quite as big as the one that Don was from, but you've experienced some challenges. So Don was in a senior-level, you know, a high-level position. You were, and I mean this in a good way, kind of in the middle of the stack. You were in an administrative role, but also in a line role, and had to kind of be that buffer between both sides as you went through the implementation. Talk a little bit about some of the things that you saw, that process, and some of the challenges that came up and what you guys did to overcome them.
Pete Kelting:
Yeah, Bill, that's a great question. And when we first started down this road, this journey was a little bit about, you know, where were our relationships with our partners, our fire folks, our EMS. And then what were our relationships with, and here in our county, we have multiple, you know, city agencies too, that we respond together. So not only was it getting implemented, a challenge of getting implemented into our own agency, but also the buy-in, excuse me, buy-in from the other agencies. So those challenges were based upon, you know, again, are we doing it together the same way. So when game day comes, that we're not wondering, "Is this the first time we've met? Is this the first time we've trained together? Do we believe in the process?" Very similar, you know, when we landed our training venues, it's interesting sometimes that, you know, even before we get set up or even class registration, we start hearing some of these concerns from folks. They start sidebarring with us early on, you know, "Hey, this is what we're concerned about. But we're eager about the class. We're really excited about the process. We know it's a national standard. but here are some of these obstacles." And we saw that in my own agency and surrounding agencies of getting on the same page. When that game day comes, you don't wanna be meeting that person in the command post or at tactical for the first time.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah, and what were some of the things that you shared with those people to help them get comfortable with it and help them open their mind?
Pete Kelting:
I think it was emphasizing confidence in the process, trust and delegation, recognizing that multiple efforts are better than just one single look at something; that process of responding early, being set up early, working with each other and moving forward.
Bill Godfrey:
And I wanna draw a comparison here because, so Don, the agency you were with, I would describe as a very large metro agency, mostly consolidated. You did have a few municipal agencies, but not a lot; whereas Pete has, you know, was a large county sheriff's office, the county fire department, but also had a lot of municipal police departments, municipal sheriff's office, many more agencies, and of course, then mutual aid from out of county coming around. What was those experiences like that were different? Do you have a sense of what that might've been?
Don Tuten:
And I feel for Pete, because it's hard trying to get all those chiefs and all those hierarchy of multiple agencies, multiple cities all on the same page. Where I'm from, we did have a few smaller cities, but we kinda ran law enforcement for 98% of the county. We ran, you know, the fire department runs 98, 99% of the county. So by changing the way that we do business and that integration, by default, the other agencies got on board, I guess is a good way to put it. But, you know, I wanna say that it doesn't come overnight. You don't take the class and everything is hunky-dory. You come out with a great skill set that everybody's on the same page with. But if you let it sit dormant and you don't take it to the next step of, okay, how are we gonna implement this moving forward; and the longer you wait, unfortunately, the harder it becomes. So, you know, the lucky thing for us also is like you mentioned before, we had some bigwigs within the classes that we taught.
Bill Godfrey:
You did have a lot of weight.
Don Tuten:
Exactly, and the biggest piece, and it ultimately comes back is, you know, the universal question: What good can come from this? Well, a whole lot of good can come from this. And if we don't implement this, then we're holding, number one, we've wasted our time and money and everything else with holding these classes. Number two, we have a methodology now that is consistent with everybody else around the country that is learning it. And if we don't get on this now, you know, then we're falling behind times. And, you know, I don't wanna be that guy, personally, saying, "Yes, Senator, we did have the training. But we failed to follow through with the implementation." So that was always in the back of my mind. I think that was in the back of my sheriff's mind as well as the fire chief at the time. And I think taking those small steps and doing the small things first make, like Pete said, maintaining those relationships, building those relationships, starting on smaller issues. And then the other thing we have here in Florida, the agency was in Florida, the other thing we have here is because we have hurricanes and because we have other events that bring us together naturally, it's another time for us to implement some of the same things that we learn in the same relationships that we have, we're now able to utilize these in, unfortunately, other times that we have to get together.
Bill Godfrey:
Pete, what do you think was a few of the most effective ways that you overcame that and got all of those agencies across disciplines and across jurisdictions to come together and kind of get on the same page? And again, as Don said, I know it didn't happen overnight. But you tried a whole bunch of things, your agency tried a whole bunch of things, and I know you did personally as well. What do you think are the top few that really had the biggest outsize impact?
Pete Kelting:
I think once we committed to the process and we put it in our MITEP, you know, our yearly planning programs. And so it was scheduled. And so when things are scheduled, it takes the excuse out of the way. You know, it takes the floating date. Oh, you know, we're gonna train on this day, this month. And then we find an excuse not to do it, either in agency or multiagencies. So once we got that into our yearly training program, we were able to exercise that, not only individually in our agency, but, you know, countywide, and also, you know, multijurisdictional with surrounding counties; putting it into full-scale exercises and focusing and emphasizing on it, and then really breaking it down afterwards to see that, okay, hey, this process works. And then be able to address what the excuses, the obstacles were, and say, "Well, look, let's look at the training. Let's look at the full-scale exercise that took place. Let's analyze that and see where we made improvement." And it was really glaring. It was really obvious. And we had a great relationship obviously in my county and jurisdictions. But it just built on that. Again, I use the word confidence, trust and delegation that we believe in each other's skill sets from law and fire, that we're gonna obtain the same results.
Bill Godfrey:
Now I know you included the outsized agencies when you were doing the exercises. What about in training? When you were conducting training, was it open to any and all of the agencies to come and send 1, 2, 10 people, whatever? How did you manage the training piece?
Pete Kelting:
Oh, absolutely. Again, it was scheduled. Our yearly training program is out to every agency in our county. So through our training director and the other agencies, we agreed to train together. You know, we held seats: five for this agency, five for that agency, you know, and so forth. So to make sure that everybody was there, it was really effective. And we had support from the community. We found training venues, you know, old car dealerships, things like that; just the commitment to the entire process and knowing that, you know, we're pushing forward, we're implementing it. And then again, the after-action of that training and showing how those steps were achieved.
Don Tuten:
Yeah, and he brings up a good point, is you have to get those other agencies as part of that training, as well as another thing that we tried to build onto also is the administration, is putting all of your head city and county administrators together, and then having them walk through it together. One, it makes 'em feel like, okay, we're doing this as an administration, but it also, it wins for us, as the trainers and as the agency trying to implement this, or agencies trying to implement this, we win. 'Cause we get them there to see what the process is. So if an incident does occur in their small jurisdiction and we are that outside help coming in to assist them, they've seen it, they know how it works. They have their own people that have been a process of it.
And you probably know this better than I do, but you have some agencies that are pretty small: they can't run, they're gonna get overwhelmed very quickly. So they're gonna need that outside, you know, outside resources coming in. In our agency, we were that outside resource, so we brought pretty much everything to the table. But you can't just go into a small jurisdiction, as you know, and then just take over. So it's a fine balance, but at the same time it is just working together, building those relationships. And I don't know how your agency does it now, but I know from the agency I'm at, now a lot of these things are covered in training. So putting cops and firemen together when they're going through, if you have training classes, even for one day. They may not see each other for another 5 or 10 years. But the reality is is we're teaching both sides that, you know what, it's okay to communicate, we're gonna work together. And it's just a matter of time.
Bill Godfrey:
For me, I have not seen anything that comes close to rivaling the effect of sharing the training with other agencies. And whether it's another discipline or another jurisdiction, I have watched in a number of cases what we would call, you know, administration, sometimes we call 'em the puzzle palace, spend an inordinate amount of time trying to legislate a thing. Meanwhile, we get the training officers together and we start doing joint training with everybody. And it wasn't a huge lift.It was just we all agreed that we would open our training up to each other and started plugging units in.
And in some cases it was, you know, we'd plug in a single battalion chief, or we'd plug in a single engine company or a single rescue company. And over time, that grew. But that reality broke down the barriers because people were people. And ultimately, you build relationships. And it's really easy to say we don't get along with this other agency. But when you're in training with 'em together and you start to get to know 'em and you find out, you know, you both like fishing on the weekends or you both like this or whatever, it's suddenly kind of hard to maintain that.
And I watched decades of animosity between agencies while the administration was completely incapable of wiping that out. I watched the line people wipe that out just by doing joint training together. have not seen anything more powerful than jointly training together. And the other piece of this is, and Don, I think you were alluding to this earlier with something you said, is there's a certain keeping up with the Joneses effect; if some particular agency in your neck of the woods is perceived to be more advanced, more sophisticated, further down the road, all of a sudden there's a pressure that everyone feels to suddenly keep up. I call it keeping up with the Joneses. And that can be a powerful influence. So instead of trying to order it and legislate it, you create the circumstances where they come to you and say, "We want to do this too."
Don Tuten:
Absolutely.
Bill Godfrey:
And there's a lot of ways to overcome these things, but I have not seen anything come close to being as effective as just putting everybody in training together.
Don Tuten:
Absolutely, and the biggest piece also, and I think it's there again, depending on the agencies and the agency size, I think having supervisor training separate than officer training a lot of times, or the same in the fire department is if you have a separate retreat, if you have a separate training value of supervisors to really hammer this home. Because the reality is is this; is listen, your guys answering calls, the guy's riding on rescues, the guy's riding, you know, in combat, they're gonna do basically what they're told. They're gonna go and they're gonna be all they can be on the police, on the fire side. But it takes that supervisor on both sides to say, "You know what? This is what we need. I need a person to do this. I need to give you an assignment and a job." And then for that, you know, the line-level guy to know, okay, I know what that job is, I've been trained to that, I'm gonna pull out my handy dandy, you know, cheat sheet here, and you know what? It's time to go to work.
Bill Godfrey:
And let's talk about the real-real for a second. 'Cause this is a couple times now that we've talked about doing something a little separate for administrators or the administration. And it is very easy to say, yeah, they didn't come to training because they're afraid of being embarrassed, especially in our class where you're actually performing in scenarios.
Don Tuten:
Yeah.
Bill Godfrey:
We're running live scenarios where you're performing in front of a room full of your peers, and there is no getting around it. And of course, it takes the first scenario for everybody to realize everybody makes mistakes, everybody in the class is gonna make a mistake, nobody knows everything and is gonna get it right. And you start to get comfortable with that. The reality is that there are leadership people and administrators that are afraid to be embarrassed in front of their troops. And instead of taking the chance to learn, they just won't go to the training. And it's very easy to sit there and armchair quarterback and condemn that. Okay, what does that get you?
Don Tuten:
Yeah.
Bill Godfrey:
Because at the end of the day, you gotta get 'em trained. Ron said this in one of the podcasts the other week: "You can have the most well-trained ground troops in the world, and one bad incident command decision can muck up the works."
Don Tuten:
100%.
Bill Godfrey:
So we've gotta get 'em trained. And if that means that we need to do private training for 'em, or we need to do an executive briefing or administrative briefing to get them comfortable with the concepts so that they don't feel like they're going in blind, and then get 'em to the training, is that really that big a price to pay? Pete, What do you think?
Pete Kelting:
No, I think, you know, that hits a home run in the troops when they see that their, you know, their bosses, their leaders are committed to the process. And, you know, what we're talking about a little bit also is the effect that this has on policy change too. You know, as we commit as an agency to our process, we've gotta dial that in and get it written into policy. And that shows that from the top down we believe in it. And then our troops are like, okay, we're moving forward with this. And this is a proven, effective response. And some of these excuses, now we can work through, we can build relationships that are gonna find the way to implement this effectively. And, you know, a lot of times, you know, again, when we come to our training venues, we see that, we see, you know, leaders or supervisors from, you know, different size agencies sometimes have an effect on that too, of how long they've been up top, how long they've been in administration; don't forget where you come from, you know, return to the back, you know, to support that and realize that, you know, this is a good thing. We need to move that direction. And I do need to get trained. I'm not afraid to, if you say, like you said, be embarrassed, I'm not afraid to make, you know, a small mistake or something. We run several scenarios that we're able to push through and train in that fashion.
Don Tuten:
Well, and the good thing about this program, and you guys know, 'cause we've been all over the country doing this, we've had five-person agencies involved. We've had 5,000-person agencies involved. And it doesn't matter what your, I hate to use the word, skill set is, the challenges are the same, the response is the same. It's how you do as an individual that makes it go away. So, I mean, you guys know, we've actually sat in some of these training classes where we've had, you know, 6, 7, 8 different law enforcement agencies and 6, 7 different fire department agencies. The first one, you know, when we run through these scenarios, like anything, it's like, "Man, I don't wanna mess up. It's a little bumpy. I don't wanna mess up bump." But as every one of you guys know, by that third day and that last scenario, it's like, "Man, we want to keep going. We want to keep doing this." And it's not just about making the problem go away. It's about I want to interact with somebody new. I wanna do a different position now. I mean, they get into it. And that is the consistent on every class that we teach, I think.
Bill Godfrey:
So what I wanna do now, I'm gonna just kind of randomly go through and pick some of these things and have you guys kind of react to 'em. So let's go with: "Unless the top thinks it's their idea, it'll never happen."
Pete Kelting:
Yeah, you know, Bill, I was just kind of alluding to that. Yeah, it depends on, you know, how entrenched that top is, right? If if they don't give the nod, then it doesn't happen. And there's a lot of agencies unfortunately that still live by that. And they're not opening themselves up to see that, you know, here's a process that can help us improve as an agency. And I think those top folks, if we look at the national events, you know, over the last couple of years, like Don was saying, you know, who wants to put their name on the responsibility of how the response was for the day? It needs to happen, it needs to be explored, it needs to see the benefit that it brings to our agency so that we work together, that tomorrow is better than yesterday. We need to learn from our responses and not have tomorrow's response be the same or worse than what yesterday was. So absolutely with, you know, those agencies, they just have to embrace the process and move forward.
Bill Godfrey:
I think the overcome that Don talked about with being able to say, all right, who's gonna put their name on the fact that we chose not to fix this problem when we knew I think is a great one. But Don, you were right near the top and certainly represented the top. And I've seen you before. You are very good with people and can turn people around very quickly. So you tell me, how would somebody approach you, what would you suggest as a couple of techniques on how to make you think it was your idea, what they're pitching.
Don Tuten:
So I think you touched on it earlier, is I don't think there's an agency in this country, whether it be fire department or law enforcement, insert here, that doesn't have the mentality of we lead from the front. I think every agency is we lead from the front. And if you're gonna have that mindset that you lead from the front, well, then, you know, your training has to be led from the front. You know, you have to be that administrator that says, "You know what? I'm always forward-thinking. I wanna be the tip of the spear." And in order to do that, it's whatever this takes to get our people trained to make this, you know, challenge go away so we don't have that. Look, my biggest fear was ending up on CNN or ending up on the Fox News going: "Hey, tell me, you know, once again, tell me why you didn't respond. Tell me why your agency was not prepared. Tell me why you waited before you went in." All the things that we've seen unfortunately in the past couple of years by some of these agencies, and this was 10 years ago; so I had that, you know, I kidded about it earlier, I'm worried about, you know, in front of our congressional members going: "Hey, we gave you the money. We gave you the tools. We gave you the time. But you failed. You personally, you were in charge of those individuals and you personally failed to give them the opportunities to succeed."
Bill Godfrey:
So I wanna try a little role-play with you here based on what you just said. And let's see how this goes. And no, we didn't talk about this earlier, so this ought to be fun. Hey boss, I want to talk to you about something for a minute that I'm a little bit concerned about. You know how you're always saying we want to lead from the front and tip of the spear and that kind of thing, and that's right, right?
Don Tuten:
Absolutely.
Bill Godfrey:
So I am actually a little worried about our ability to respond to an active shooter event and not have it turn into a mess, and get the things done that we need to get done in the timeframe so that we don't end up with fatalities that didn't need to be fatalities and shouldn't have been fatalities. And I found this process. I'm not sure that it's really gonna work for our agency. I kind of want your take on it. But it's been endorsed by the NTOA, it's part of a DHS curriculum. It's been around for years. It's got a bunch of good reviews. There's been a couple after-actions that have cited it. So I think it's pretty legit. But would you be willing to take a look at this and consider this?
Don Tuten:
Yeah, well, first and foremost, the easiest thing is is absolutely. The second thing that I would follow up with is, okay, contact the company immediately. Find out, get references from 'em. 'Cause let's talk to the people. You're saying it's cited nationally as being the national standard. Let's find out how do we fund it. Let's find out how we can get on the list. And let's really talk to 'em to see how we can get bumped up the list so we can get this knocked out a little quicker than the latter.
Bill Godfrey:
Pete, what's your reaction? You were sitting there smiling while we were doing that.
Pete Kelting:
Well I knew he was coming with the positive, but I'll kind of give you the adverse role-play if I'm that boss-
Bill Godfrey:
Okay, hit me.
Pete Kelting:
I'd say, "Listen, we've already spent a lot," excuse me, "spent a lot of time and money and effort into the way that we already do it. We've some people to this training or that training, and I think, you know, we need to stay the course where we're at. You know, it's already working for us. But obviously, you're coming to me from a different perspective."
Bill Godfrey:
You know, you make a really good point. And we have spent a lot of time, money, frankly just energy, a lot of our training time in trying to do that stuff. And I think some of it's been effective, some of it's been good. I think there's pieces of it that are really good, how the contact teams work together and the idea of the RTF concept. But I'm not sure that we've really got the management piece, because we, at least in the sessions that I attended, we really didn't talk about that at all. We just focused on the contact team training, and then we separately did the RTF training. And there's a lot of moving parts to that in a real-live event that happen under a lot of time pressure. And I don't think what we've been doing covers that, Boss.
Pete Kelting:
You know, you make a good point. I'm glad that you brought it up. Because, you know, I've been very committed to what we've already put time and effort into. But if you're at where the closest to the potential problem is, you know, we need to take a look at that. You know, put everything down on paper. Bring me a plan. I'll bring it up at the next executive meeting. And let's discuss that because-
Don Tuten:
And I need you to plan a full-scale scenario.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah.
Pete Kelting:
Right.
Don Tuten:
So let's find out what our gaps are, because-
Bill Godfrey:
That's always the pushback too. You bring 'em the idea, you're gonna be doing the work. And by the way, you guys are both grinning at me, 'cause you know when I was actually on the job, I was never that diplomatic about a damn thing in my career. But I think that's a good example. So let's jump to another one. Pete, I'm gonna throw this one at you. So you're meeting with the fire department, and the fire department's position is they must be in command. That's their policy, that they're in command. The first thing they do is arrive on scene and take command and be in charge, and they're not gonna change their policy.
Pete Kelting:
That's a good one. I mean, we've heard that for a long time now, over, you know, a decade of these trainings being in place, and our process making its way to a national standard now. You know, I think most of the time today we realize, especially in active shooter incident management, law enforcement's the first on scene. And I think it comes to, again, not having that conversation on game day, right? The relationship should have already been built. The training should have already happened. The slice, however you may want to talk about, you know, command and who's gonna take charge needs to be worked out and trained early on so that that topic doesn't happen in the command bus, doesn't happen at tactical and triage. I think that's easily overcomeable.
Don Tuten:
The biggest thing for us is this is a crime scene. What we're training for, this specifically, and what we do, it's a crime scene. So unless the fire department has training in maintaining crime scenes, evidence recovery, all the things that law enforcement does, it is not a fire incident. With that said, we want you to be in charge. We want you to be in charge of a lot of things. I'm gonna need a triage person. And you know what? Policemen are not good triage people. Fire department is. I'm gonna need a good transport person. Police department, that's not what we do. We will work together. Ultimately, at the end of the day, if this is a fire, fire department's in charge; this is what you do all day long. If this is ultimately a crime scene, law enforcement is in charge.
Pete Kelting:
Yeah, I mean, I'll add to that is being ready. You know, the component of fire at a active shooter incident is being ready, getting those RTFs built out with the law enforcement partnership and staging. And basically, that portion of it being ready to respond.
Bill Godfrey:
And I'll say, as the lone fire guy at the table, I kind of understand this. And I think that the fire people who would say this are not necessarily going back to the origins and thinking about where that's coming from and why they say that. There's a couple of issues at play here, not the least of which is most fire departments in this country are quite used to and accustomed to their police department not taking command of anything: period, ever. Most police agencies just don't use ICS. And so as a fire service, we get in the habit of having to establish command because it's our policy, but it's habit. And we're not at all accustomed to law enforcement even thinking that they need to establish command, let alone setting one up and taking command and having be an effective command. And so we're misguided in a way to assume that we need to do that job. And if you think back to the origins of ICS and NIMS, and frankly, the philosophies and tenets that are still in ICS and NIMS now, there's nothing to say that everybody needs to be in charge. In fact, it's quite the opposite of that. But I would also submit this little tidbit as evidence.
As you guys well know, we spend a lot of time looking at actual incidents that have occurred, going through the after-action reports, talking to people involved. There have been a number of high-profile incidents where the fire department established command and had their command post in one location. And law enforcement, whether they did it early or whether they did it later, ultimately establishes a command, and established their own command post in a different location. And they never reconciled it. And there's not a single one of those incidents that didn't have problems. Now, in fairness, I don't think there was any active shooter events that didn't have problems. But many of the problems that occur when you've got a separate command posts of law enforcement's over here and fire's over here, get resolved very quickly if you're in the same space. And so I understand the comment: it's misguided. And I think if you take people back to their roots and walk them through it, and like you said, Don, this is a murder in progress.
Don Tuten:
Right.
Bill Godfrey:
At what point is there legislative authority for the fire department to be in charge of a murder in progress? Now, that doesn't mean that you don't use unified command. You can go to unified command. You do all these things. It's all good stuff. But don't let that get in the way of the clock.
Don Tuten:
Well, and in addition to that, you have this one: hey, fire department wants to be in charge. And the very next one is, well, we're not gonna go in until it's a cold zone. So I mean, you know, pick your poison. You know, we need you to be part of the team, team as we do it. We all work on this together. And I think we talked about this earlier too. Where do you out-train this? You do it on your known events. You do it on your smaller events within your communities. You start getting through these obstacles immediately. And then on pre-planned events, you start putting this together.
Bill Godfrey:
So we've still got a whole bunch of these to go through, and I feel like there's some good meat here. But Karla gave me the signal that we were at our 30-minute mark about five minutes ago. So what do you guys say we split this into a two-parter?
Don Tuten:
Perfect.
You good? You guys are good with that?
Don Tuten:
Absolutely.
Bill Godfrey:
All right, well, that'll take us to the end of part 1 then. Please come back next week for part 2. And I'd like to thank Karla Torres, our producer. Also remind you, if you've not subscribed to the podcast, whether you're consuming the podcast on YouTube or on your favorite podcast source, please do subscribe and like the podcast. That helps us get the message out. And until next time, we'll see you for part 2 of this. Stay safe.