Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
It’s more than a name change, though. If we created a new service to deal with the public health and safety needs of 2021, it wouldn’t look much like the fire departments we have in how we train, equip, and fund it.
And this isn’t just a City of Calgary or Alberta government problem. It’s a problem right across North America of community needs and resources changing, but entrenched perceptions and interests being very slow to change with them.
Calgary’s finances are still in decent shape, but many municipalities and counties in North America are sliding into financial crisis owing to unsustainable costs of police and fire services which make up the lion’s share of public spending in those communities. Meanwhile, there’s a critical shortage of EMS drivers and forest fire fighters, who get paid much less than firefighters. It’s an egregious misallocation of resources and funding.
Honestly, just read the article.
It’s depressing that this kind of important issue so often devolves into appeals to emotion and the usual partisan finger-pointing. This is what our politics should be about - making tough decisions on how to allocate finite resources and deal with looming structural crisis. But we won’t even acknowledge these sorts of structural problems even when the data couldn’t possibly me more clear.
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Couldn't agree more with the bolded. I think we'd really need 2 forces with multi-disciplinary teams:
Crime and Social Problems
- you'd retain a lot of the current structure for detectives, SWAT, bomb squad, etc. but 'beat work' could be more partnerships between fully-trained police and social workers (with additional weapons/defence/conflict deflation training)
- perhaps empowering bylaw and peace officers a bit more
Health and Accident Response
- fire and EMS seem to respond to the same calls anyways...we probably need more ambulances and fewer firetrucks
- given the upstream issues at the hospital, do we really need two fully trained paramedics and an ambulance tied up until an ER can accept a patient? There are issues with liability and transfer of care, but we shouldn't let that be such a big barrier
- overall more flexibility for deployment...more firefighters in vans/SUVs who could almost serve as chauffeurs - pick up the single paramedic who stayed at the hospital with the patient while their partner drove away in the ambulance...pick up the social worker who stayed with a domestic victim while their cop partner took away the perp, etc.