Maine sheriff's deputy goes off on ME state police

[RoyGBiv]

This stuff isn't easy.

Speaking as a lowly civilian radio operator....

You can take ICS 300 annually, but, when the SHTF, and you haven't hands-on trained for it and made it routine (and who has the time and resources to do that?).... communicating successfully can be the first thing to get sacrificed to the Gods of problem solving.

[Tensaw]

Jeez,... I thought we learned the lesson on interagency comms on 9/11...

[TQP]

Where I'm coming from: 30+ years in the fire service, my retirement gig is as a 911 dispatcher, in one of the 3 centers who handle our state mutual aid system.


Unfortunately, the only way to get good at this sort of stuff is to do it a lot. And I hope to God that none of us ever get enough practice to get good at this stuff. The more players you involve, the more complicated all of this gets and you can of course do exercises, but I don't think there's any good, remotely cost-effective way to simulate the amount of chaos you get. In the fire service, we do small scale Incident Management System (IMS) incidents daily and OUR big incidents are messy. Even here in the big city, where the city FD has someone who's job it is to run multi-alarm fires on duty 24/7. And LE gets to 'practice' big incident IMS every fall, because they go all out for OSU home football games.

The latest BJS numbers, from 2018, show Maine with 144 agencies, with 4278 sworn FTEs. That includes 109 local, with an average size of 20 FTE, and 17 SOs with an average of around 50. That is a lot of radio channels, radio systems, and SOPs. The same report says that MSP is only 322 sworn. All of that leads me to believe that there is just not a whole lot of people available who have any experience staffing or running a big, messy incident.

I just finished taking a 24 hour IMS course for dispatchers ( Blue Card, for all my fire peeps) and one of the things that they kept emphasizing is that you have to set up your IMS early, and staff it appropriately, if you don't want your incident to go off the rails. That's just not going to happen at active shooter incidents. Especially not in places like this, and after hours so all the ranking officers are at home. And the big agency brass are a 30 minute drive away. And officers are coming in one or 2 at a time from all directions. By the time there's enough people on scene to actually have spare people to try and set something up, it's very hard to bring order out of chaos.

Just some random thoughts , from the outside looking in.

[TQP]

Jeez,... I thought we learned the lesson on interagency comms on 9/11...

I mean we did, kinda.

It's WAY better than it was. But it's still not perfect. And interoperable radios are such a small part of the whole picture. And you have to actually interoperate. When the big one happens, the best systems in the world aren't going to turn
"Chief Smith, this is Chief Jones of agency XYZ" into "Steve? This is Bob Jones".

[Notorious E.O.C.]

Hm. As the handle implies, emergency manager here. I've been working EM at the local level for over a decade and I've had the joy of seeing both successful and... not successful... applications of ICS for large incidents. The following observations are from the perspective of an EM practitioner who works adjacent to these spaces but who does not come from a first responder background. I will attempt to stay in my lane here, and recognize which subforum I'm posting in - but I feel like this is sufficiently adjacent to my space that I can offer some relevant input.

My planning assumption is that in a mass shooting incident, effective unified command will not be established until at least an hour into the incident. That's also my mark for the absolute earliest I will be able to have my EOC staffed and oriented to the level at which it can begin providing effective support to those ICs.

You can take ICS 300 annually, but, when the SHTF, and you haven't hands-on trained for it and made it routine (and who has the time and resources to do that?).... communicating successfully can be the first thing to get sacrificed to the Gods of problem solving.

This. IME, large fire departments are the (only) organizations who have the time, resources, and motivation to make it routine. It takes sustained commitment at the command staff level. The fire department that's my benchmark for doing ICS right (not blindly by the FEMA book, but actually thinking about it) had an ICS guru and champion at the district major/battalion chief level who had the right combination of credibility, charisma, and clout to drag his peers by the ear into actually learning and using ICS... and then they forced their engine captains and lieutenants to use it on every call, even single-unit responses. It became department culture down to the lowest supervisory level. They're also a department with ~600 sworn staff and >20 stations, so they have the bench depth for constant training cycles.

(You will never see that at East Nowhere Valley VFD, or even smaller cities' full-time paid fire departments, because of resource constraints. This is something that FEMA misses again and again and again. I am convinced that neither FEMA HQ nor the regional offices understand a damned thing about how public safety works outside the UASI cities. But I digress.)

I am resigned to never seeing law enforcement adopt ICS beyond the bare minimum necessary to demonstrate NIMS compliance for grant funding. There are both practical and cultural barriers to that adoption. On the vast majority of LE calls for service, ICS would add no value - so there's no operational efficiency or officer safety incentive to practice it on every call and make it second nature. ICS also relies heavily on middle management, and most LE calls don't expand enough to need that degree of supervision and resource management. While I have seen some agencies where the command staff takes ICS seriously, I've never seen them push that down to the lieutenants and sergeants who will realistically be the ones who have to establish the initial command and accountability structures that @TQP highlights.

(Another aside: one of ICS' ongoing issues is that it's really an organizational system for wildlands firefighting with the original nameplates hastily spray-painted to generic federal blue. The farther away from large-scale fires, hazmat, and SAR you get, the less relevant ICS appears for routine operations. If you never use a tool, you forget where you left it during the sudden "oh, shit, I need that now" moment...)

Jeez,... I thought we learned the lesson on interagency comms on 9/11...

"Interoperability" has a human component that gets lost in all the discussions about the technological solutions. Everyone wants money for P25 radios but no one wants to take the absolutely free step of giving up their proprietary ten-code sheets and using the plain English they shoulda learned in high school...

[Screwball]

All of that leads me to believe that there is just not a whole lot of people available who have any experience staffing or running a big, messy incident.

The last time I had to deal directly with MSP, it was due to radio issues in the car I was in (car was from a port to the north of us, so key wasn’t right), being first on scene of an armed bank robbery. Had the other officer call 911 for a good connection.

After stating we had 2 officers on scene of the bank robbery… she was put on hold. Then, we get “they left bank, heading south in a grey car” before being hung up on. At that time, we had a BP unit meeting us… who came from the south… and I yelled what was told, and started hauling down the road after the car.

We had multiple MSP units going north past us, but being on the same frequency, plan was to meet with the BP units coming north and find the car in between. Found it… but just was a taxi that the guy used to get from one bank to the second one. Wasn’t a smart guy, as he left his money in the back seat. He was tased across the street from the back, and he watch me posting up on the door, getting the bad info and flooring it south.

I’ve dealt with MSP numerous times, and can’t say anything bad about most of the situations. Well, one exception… but not voicing the specifics online. The incident…

https://www.newscentermaine.com/arti...9-f91da498c158

But to expand on the quoted part… ME is pretty huge. You got Portland, Bangor, Augusta, Lewiston/Auburn, and Brunswick. They aren’t right next to one another… but are predominantly down state (Bangor is more central than the rest). Everything else… smaller size and FAR apart.

I’m in Houlton, which is in Aroostook County (same county as in Lake Placid, even though it is geographically wrong in movie). The county is as large as CT and RI combined. It has under 50,000 people. My town back in NJ is about 60 square miles with the same population. Houlton has a lot of L/E… local (PD with 9 sworn), county (jail, but Sheriff also covers that large area without PDs), state (local barracks, but recently moved to just doing highway and serious calls only) and multiple Federal agencies (CBP, BP station and sector HQ). It is understood at work, if something like an active shooter happened in the town, we are responding just like BP.

[TQP]

I can't agree more with what @Notorious E. O. C. posted. *

In LE's defense, fire comes to scenes not as individuals, but preformed teams with basic assignments built in. Even more important, our command units aren't capable of anything BUT command, besides EMS first response ( and even then they aren't GOOD at it, but better than nothing, so it's easier for them to move into command when the next unit arrives.)

The training/training infrastructure point is valid as far as it goes, but I think you give the bigger agencies too much credit for being able to accomplish things. Especially now, when everyone in public safety is going to work every day with minimum staffing as a best-case scenario. Big means busy, and the difference between a 4 unit agency taking 1 OOS for training, and a 40 unit one taking 10, is not that great. Yes you can spread it out more by taking 2 out at a time, and taking that much longer finishing this training requirement and starting the next one, but there's only so long you can stretch it out before you make it impossible to fit all the other mandatory subjects in every year.

We ( my 85-ish member suburban fire department and our similar sized suburban PD) did active shooter training together a few years back. What the police sergeants and the fire battalion chiefs decided, after a couple of really rough evolutions- not at the task level, but at the command level- ( Tellingly, nobody higher than shift commander participated) that fire would set up ICS, and that LE would plug into it as soon as they could spare a supervisor. And also that LE would take command at that point. Our most likely scenario is a school shooting, police HQ is right next to the high school, and the assumption is that there would be command officers available fairly quickly in that particular scenario.

All of that said, the only reason the training happened at all was that there was buy in at the fire and police chief level, and we're both pretty well funded and can afford to pay out the OT. Where one of my good friends works, where a department my size IS the big one in the county, it could never happen because it couldn't, no matter how much anyone wanted it to.

(Another aside: one of ICS' ongoing issues is that it's really an organizational system for wildlands firefighting with the original nameplates hastily spray-painted to generic federal blue. The farther away from large-scale fires, hazmat, and SAR you get, the less relevant ICS appears for routine operations. If you never use a tool, you forget where you left it during the sudden "oh, shit, I need that now" moment...)

Quoted for truth. I know this very well because I tried to adapt some ICS principles to organizing a volunteer organization with management and span-of-control issues that I was a part of. It flat out, 100%, failed. Bigly.

Finally, I worry that those of us in the big metro areas get lulled into a false sense of security by our ability to handle 99%+ of incidents without breaking a sweat. That 1 percenter is going to hurt us and good, and, as they say, the dildo of consequence rarely arrives lubed.

* one day, my mentions will work correctly. Today is not that day.

[Hambo]

IME every multi-agency event was a shit show at some level.

[Notorious E.O.C.]

In LE's defense, fire comes to scenes not as individuals, but preformed teams with basic assignments built in. Even more important, our command units aren't capable of anything BUT command, besides EMS first response ( and even then they aren't GOOD at it, but better than nothing, so it's easier for them to move into command when the next unit arrives.)

Thank you for explicitly pointing that out. That is a huge difference. In a certain local jurisdiction, the chief of our largest FD isn't even maintaining his SCBA certification any more. I know the dude - it's not laziness. It's a conscious acknowledgement of the fact that going into structure fires is Not His Job. By design, that lack of certification removes the temptation for him and his senior staff and staples them to the command post.

The training/training infrastructure point is valid as far as it goes, but I think you give the bigger agencies too much credit for being able to accomplish things. Especially now, when everyone in public safety is going to work every day with minimum staffing as a best-case scenario. Big means busy, and the difference between a 4 unit agency taking 1 OOS for training, and a 40 unit one taking 10, is not that great. Yes you can spread it out more by taking 2 out at a time, and taking that much longer finishing this training requirement and starting the next one, but there's only so long you can stretch it out before you make it impossible to fit all the other mandatory subjects in every year.

No argument here. That agency I hold up as an ideal also benefits from a fairly large annual infusion of grant funding due to some specific programs in their region, so they have capacity that is somewhat in excess of the national average.

(Don't get me started on capacity limits in my own discipline. The majority of rural counties don't even have a single full-time EM practitioner on the payroll, and we have nothing in the way of formal, enforced professional standards.)

We ( my 85-ish member suburban fire department and our similar sized suburban PD) did active shooter training together a few years back. What the police sergeants and the fire battalion chiefs decided, after a couple of really rough evolutions- not at the task level, but at the command level- ( Tellingly, nobody higher than shift commander participated) that fire would set up ICS, and that LE would plug into it as soon as they could spare a supervisor. And also that LE would take command at that point. Our most likely scenario is a school shooting, police HQ is right next to the high school, and the assumption is that there would be command officers available fairly quickly in that particular scenario.

It's heartening that y'all actually did the training and had the conversations. In my previous jurisdiction, metro PD wouldn't even come out for Rescue Task Force workups. The crowd was Fire/EMS, school district PD, and local university PDs. Metro's take on RTF was, "we've done our training internally, call us and we'll deploy the Bearcat and handle it for you." Completely incapable of comprehending the need for pre-incident joint training, planning, or coordination. *headdesk*

I do love challenging assumptions when I design exercises, though. I've worked real-world major examples of command staff being unavailable. Had one severe weather incident where my only PD contact was the third shift patrol supervisor - the next three levels of his chain of command were all away at a conference. Had another incident that started about half an hour after a smaller department's top leadership was in a rollover accident requiring extrication. So I can and will justify an inject that begins with, "sir, you are out of play due to emergency appendix surgery, please take this evaluator worksheet and watch your people play through this one." A chief or executive's reaction to that tells me a lot about his character and how well he's mentored his subordinate leaders.

Finally, I worry that those of us in the big metro areas get lulled into a false sense of security by our ability to handle 99%+ of incidents without breaking a sweat. That 1 percenter is going to hurt us and good, and, as they say, the dildo of consequence rarely arrives lubed.

Yyyyyuuup. No one is too big to fail. And even if that 1% is technically within the jurisdiction's capabilities, all the other calls for service don't stop. Those may be "routine" but some of 'em are still going to be life and death.

[LittleLebowski]

Good thread.