3-4 Page Paper

Module 3 Leadership Challenges in the Public Safety Environment

Current Challenges

The field of public safety has changed dramatically in the past 50 years. Specialties such as homeland security, corporate security, and emergency management were virtually unheard of. Being chief of a fire or police department today is drastically different than it was in 1950. This is, of course, exactly what we would expect. Technology has changed, populations have expanded, laws have multiplied, regulatory agencies have been created, and what we as a society consider functions of public safety are drastically different. The expected outcomes are the same—that citizens are safe and secure—but the duties and level of complexity of the system within which we are to deliver those outcomes has become exponentially more complex.

The forces creating this increasing complexity and change are not particularly surprising or unusual, yet they present ongoing challenges to organizational leaders.

The budget challenge

Public safety is not inexpensive. For a multitude of reasons, public safety cost governments far more today than it has in the past. Police and fire account for the majority of the average municipal government’s general operating expenses, on average 52% (34% police, 18% fire) “On a per capita basis, police spending has increased from an inflation adjusted $75 per person in 1960 to $295 per person in 2008. In other words, local government spending on policing has increased by nearly 300% during this period” (Edwards & Bienvenu, 2011, p. 4).

Consider Detroit: In 1950, police and fire accounted for 17 % of the municipal budget: 12% for police and 5% for fire. In 2012, with police at 32% and fire at 15%, public safety accounts for 47% of the budget expenditures, even though the population shrank by 25% between those years. (Bomey & Gallagher, 2013).

The budget challenges are not limited to emergency services. According to many reports, cybersecurity is woefully underfunded:

Companies including utilities, banks and phone carriers would have to spend almost nine times more on cybersecurity to prevent a digital Pearl Harbor from plunging millions into darkness, paralyzing the financial system or cutting communications, a Bloomberg Government study found. (Engleman & Strohm, 2012)

On the flip side of this is federal spending on homeland security. Homeland security spending has continued to increase at what many feel is an unsustainable rate.

Homeland Security Spending Since 9/11

The task challenge

The tasks that public safety organizations are responsible for have increased significantly due to changes in society, technology, and laws. The addition of emergency management provides a good example. Decades ago, public safety at the local, state, and even federal levels included minimal governmental responsibility for disaster planning and response. Following Hurricane Agnes in 1972, disaster response and preparedness began to come to the forefront. States and local municipalities added a new moving part to their public safety machines: emergency management. As acceptance of responsibility for emergency management became standard from the federal level down to local municipal governments, a new set of complexities emerged. Public safety leaders now had to contend with not only accomplishing the standard four phases of emergency management for their jurisdictions, but also negotiating the difficult system of intergovernmental interoperability between all the parts of the system. The weaknesses in this of aspect of the system were not widely recognized by the public until Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Changes to existing law, adoption of new laws, and the development of regulatory and certifying agencies has added additional tasks as well as increasing complexity. A public safety leader must be able to understand the requirements of large bodies of law that regulate his or her field, and effective methods to work with outside individuals, the private sector, and nongovernmental organizations.

While we are spending more money, we are also busier on every front. It is expected that most agencies will get busier as time goes on; however, the rate at which our tasks are increasing is quite rapid. Consider Duluth, Minnesota: “In 1968, the Department had 142 officers who answered 35,000 calls for service. In 2010 the Department answered approximately 82,313 calls for service with 144 officers” (Ramsay, 2011, executive summary).

Canada is experiencing the same issues. A 2004 study in British Columbia (Malm et al., 2005) found that in 30 years, the population of BC had doubled, reported crimes increased seven-fold, and administrative tasks increased four-fold (p. 2). The complexity of the tasks the officers performed had also increased substantially during that time, requiring more training and more specialization.

Emergency medical service providers across the country are seeing dramatic increases in calls for service. Some providers are looking at expanding the types of services they provide in an attempt to reduce the demand for emergency services. Prevention programs, education programs, and even home visits are being piloted (Hallman, 2013), as providers grapple with increased calls for service that are not matched with budget increases.

Corrections is in the same boat. The U.S. prison population saw a 700% increase between 1970 and 2005, and rates continued to climb for years after that (Pew, 2007, p. ii). Over the past 30 years, according to a 2013 report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the federal prison population has jumped from 25,000 to 219,000 inmates, an increase of nearly 790 percent (James, 2013, summary).

Although many states have seen a drop in populations in recent years, corrections remains as challenged as fire and police, if not more so.

As tasks have evolved, so have some fundamental ideas of how we approach and complete them. Historically, creativity and imagination were not highly valued in the public safety arena. In fact, the 9/11 panel's chairman, Thomas Kean, noted, "As we detail in our report, this was a failure of policy, management, capability, and—above all—a failure of imagination" (Kean & Hamilton, 2004). Public safety organizations are often bureaucracies, which by their nature do not reward or foster imagination or creative thinking. Tomorrow’s leaders must find a way to bring imagination and creative thinking into their departments. A good leader must manage a growing diversity and number of tasks with energy and drive to inspire organizational thinking to reach further than the obvious methods or traditional ideas.

The social media challenge

Media has always affected public safety. The 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire was well photographed, and for the first time, the public was able to put a human face on the tragedy. The photographs helped stir a public outrage that led to many reforms. In 1958, Our Lady of the Angels Catholic school in Chicago suffered a horrific fire that killed nearly 100 children and nuns. A photograph of firefighter Richard Scheidt carrying the body of ten-year-old John Jajkowski from his classroom, printed on the opening page of the story in Life magazine, stirred the nation to action. Sweeping changes—including sprinklers and fire drills—were put into place, and as a result, this country has not seen a single school fire death in 50 years. All of these comprehensive changes added to the tasks and complexity of public safety delivery.

Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, expanding media access, including television, had an increasing effect on how we deliver public safety services and what the public expects. In addition to driving reform, media—particularly television—also drive technology adoption, sometimes even preceding the actual technology itself. The public has a fascination with public safety services as entertainment. Some of the first shows to hit the airwaves on radio and television were about policing. Now viewers have a wide choice of shows about policing at the local, state, and federal level, as well as programs about firefighters. A subtle effect of these shows is that viewers expect their local police to do many of the things they see on television, even when they involve procedures or equipment not commonly within reach of a small department.

In the past several years, social media has become a big part of public safety.  Although many departments have found social media very useful for a wide variety of tasks, all departments are struggling with the extra hours and personnel that managing social media and policing social media problems presents. Social media and the web have tremendous usefulness as a tool for communicating to the public about safety, preparedness and prevention, emergency management, and more, but someone must be assigned to manage it. The flip side of this is that departments now have a separate set of administrative procedures and rules to enforce surrounding members’ use of media, as well as new crimes, such as cyber stalking, that have come about through the public use of social media.

An additional challenge of social media and our new 24-hour-a-day media culture is that while every fire or police chief in history has had to deal with the media, it is only recently that every incident is captured on camera, and even more recently that almost every person is broadcasting about the incident through Twitter, Facebook,  and other social networks. Public safety leaders of today face a tremendous challenge managing media. 

The changing workforce challenge

In the early years of organized police and fire departments, the majority of the public safety workforce were white male Christians who had no more than a high school education before attending the academy. As a result, historically, many public safety employees have perceived their workforce as one of homogeneity. However, since 1950, fire and police departments have become more diverse in national origin, gender, religion, and background, and at the same time policing and firefighting have become professions requiring education beyond a high school diploma. The process of change has been acrimonious in some cases and amicable in others.  Today’s public safety providers are far more representative of the nation as a whole, yet there is still work to be done in this area. Leaders are challenged to lead effectively through proactive and positive change management in this very difficult area.

Public safety delivery has become complex; more than simple training is required. Over the past 25 years, fire service and law enforcement have become professions, with the accompanying college degrees and certifications. Further, the integration of homeland security, emergency management, corporate security, and other fields into the realm of public safety has also changed the face of public safety by creating a demand for new skill sets. In some cases those skill sets are very specialized—for example, in chemistry and physics—and require graduate-level education. Leadership is challenged to further the growth of public safety as a profession and to provide personal and organizational development guidance for their staff and agencies.

As is the way of the world, young people entering the public safety workforce have grown up in a world fundamentally different than that of many of the people they will work for as they begin their careers. Very soon, younger individuals entering the workplace will not remember the public safety environment of a pre-9/11 world. They also have no memory of the United States in peacetime, having grown up with the country in a constant state of military action.

Born between 1980 and 2000, Millennials comprise nearly a quarter of the world population. They're the first generation to grow up surrounded by digital media. Two thirds of them used computers before the age of five. They are connected 24/7 to friends, parents, information and entertainment. Accustomed to being the center of attention, they have high expectations and clear goals. They are willing to work hard, and expect to have the support they need to achieve. They have older parents and were brought up in smaller families. One in four has at least one college-educated parent. Citizens of the world, they are the most racially and ethnically diverse generation in history. (Raines & Arnsparger, 2010)

Public safety leaders must connect with this generation and understand that policies and procedure books, employee manuals, employee benefit packages, and the like written for their baby-boomer forefathers are not necessarily appropriate, workable, or desirable for the people entering employment today. The challenge for leaders is to adapt the organization in ways that help our organizations hire and retain quality staff by meeting them where they are rather than lamenting the lack of fit with existing ideas.

At this point, you should consider recognized public safety leaders you have read about or encountered. The fourth part of your course-long assignment requires you to apply what you have learned about leadership to the specific environment of public safety by conducting a Public Safety Leadership Assessment .

Emerging Challenges

Across all fields of public safety, common themes emerge with respect to challenges for leaders in the future. In particular, three areas of focus emerge:

1. the change from a command-and-control mentality to collaborative approaches

2. financial demands that are driving evidence-based alignment of outcomes with expenditures

3. public expectations of ethical behavior, transparency, and responsiveness

The change from a command-and-control mentality to collaborative approaches

Emergency management scholars such as William Waugh of University of Delaware were among the first to identify the growing need for a collaborative approach. Traditionally, public safety operated with a go-it-alone, command-and-control outlook and methodology. This approach no longer produces satisfactory or successful outcomes in emergency management, nor in any other facet of public safety. We now need to work within a multilevel, multistakeholder environment. This increase in the need for interface is not confined solely to intergovernmental interoperability. Today’s public safety delivery requires cooperative work with nongovernmental organizations and the private sector.

The need for increased collaborative efforts has been recognized in every aspect of public safety. William Bratton, former Los Angeles police chief and New York police commissioner, teamed up with Harvard Kennedy School’s Zachary Tumin in 2012 to publish a book titled, Collaborate or Perish! Reaching Across Boundaries in a Networked World. In this work, they share their experiences and explain why public safety employees—and everyone else—must adopt a collaborative (cooperative) approach to achieving our goals. They cite the need for collaboration not only among local, state, and federal players, but also among citizens, organizations, public safety entities at all levels, and other stakeholders.

Former NIC Correctional Program Specialist Eduardo Barajas, Jr., also identifies the need for collaboration in the corrections system:

Criminal justice and correctional agencies/organizations can no longer afford to be isolated from one another or from other public service delivery systems. The importance of collaboration stems not only from the rewards of working together toward the common good, as Barajas asserts, but also from its potential usefulness in controlling the increasing costs of expanding correctional systems. (Campbell, 2006, p. 182)

A community group in Michigan brought together leaders from many areas and created a guide to collaboration in the fire service noting:

Timely and efficient fire service is at the heart of what citizens expect from their city government. The idea of cutting back on manpower, equipment, or training is disturbing to citizens and city officials alike, but with fire service funding requiring a large portion of municipal budgets, it is one of the first areas administrators look to when revenue dwindles. Because fire departments have a long tradition of cooperation (few fire departments do not have some type of mutual aid agreement with neighboring communities) and because fire service is so vital to citizens, it is an optimum area to collaborate. (Michigan Suburbs Alliance, n.d., p. 02)

One of the reasons for the complexity in the system today, and another big challenge for public safety leadership, is the need to work with other levels of government, organizations, and individuals in a style that is not necessarily part of our inherited public safety culture. Readings for individualized areas of public safety are listed here. Read about some of the drivers and ideas to get a better understanding of the need for collaboration and the skills to lead in a collaborative environment:

· Collaboration and leadership for effective emergency management

· Correctional leadership competencies for the 21st century: Manager and supervisor levels

· Correctional leadership competencies for the 21st century: Executives and senior-level leaders

· Creating collaborative communities: Fire service

· Future role of fire service in homeland security

· Report on the first regional EMS forum

FEMA has begun to recognize that the path forward for public safety demands a collaborative approach. In recent years, the organization has formally recognized the need to move toward a collaborative approach and have launched the “Whole Community” concept. Read about how this approach works .

Financial demands that are driving evidence-based alignment of outcomes with expenditures

As presented earlier, public safety is expensive, and it’s not getting any less expensive. It is also the last thing that most people want to cut in the budget. Given those two constraints, it is not surprising that those of us in public safety are beginning to look closely at how we spend our money in relation to the outcomes we want to achieve.

The rapidly expanding prison problem pushed corrections into the evidence-based decision-making ring early on. Corrections was the first area to widely research the connections of outcomes to methods and to money spent. The results of this research have been used to lead change in corrections nationwide.

A Pew Charitable Trust report eloquently summed up the financial challenge this presents for public safety leaders: “The key is for policy makers to base their decisions on a clear understanding of the costs and benefits of incarceration—and of data-driven, evidence-based alternatives that can preserve public safety while saving much-needed tax dollars” (Pew, 2007, p. v).

This particular report addresses corrections, but the same holds true for all aspects of public safety. We are challenged in new ways as financial demands increase in every respect; the public safety leader faces a major challenge in aligning outcomes with increasing tasks and money spent. Historically, public safety has been resistant to research, but we are now moving toward an environment of data-driven decision-making.

Canada is already making great strides in the field of fire protection services research. In 2013, through a partnership among the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs (CAFC), the University of the Fraser Valley, and Defense Research and Development Canada, the university has been given $134,550 to “identify short- and medium-term national science and technology research priorities for Canada’s fire service, and provide a framework that will enable fire services of any size to implement evidence-based policy and decision-making” (McDonald, 2013).

Police departments are also looking at how they can use research to get the most out of the money they spend. This is a complex process, involving many aspects that are not necessarily apparent at first, including questions of how to measure police performance, given that some aspects of public safety are intangible (Davis, 2012).

Emergency management was another early adopter of the evidence-based ideology. That field has the advantage of a large body of research that has been compiled over many years through colleges and universities such as the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center There has been a long struggle to join the research on disaster planning and response to actual disaster planning and response practices, in large part because the research suggests that some commonly held beliefs about how to prepare for and manage disasters are not accurate and do not further the outcomes they were once believed to achieve.

Public safety leadership must embrace the benefits of evidence-based decision-making, while accepting that we do not yet know all of the questions we need to ask or exactly how to ask them. This is a difficult mindset for some public safety agencies, as the field in general has long operated on instinct and gut feelings to guide decision-making. Public safety will grow increasingly more costly, and competition for funding will never decrease, making it critical that tomorrow’s leaders use research effectively and efficiently to inform decisions at all levels.

Public expectations of ethical behavior, transparency, and responsiveness

On any given day, if you scan through the headlines, Facebook, Twitter, or other social media, it is easy to find a new story revolving around ethics—or lack thereof—in public administration. The nature of public safety decision-making is that we often operate in situations where what is ethically the right answer is not always clear cut. In addition, the public often holds public safety providers to a higher standard than they hold average citizens. “Right to Know” and “Sunshine” laws have increased the demand for transparency at all levels of government and have made bad behaviors and decisions more easily discoverable. Although daily ethical dilemmas are part of the job in public safety, that does not mean that we cannot prepare personnel to ensure ethical decision-making, both in their work and in their personal lives.

Many public safety leadership training programs now incorporate ethics into the curriculum. At its root, “making ethical decisions requires the ability to make distinctions between competing choices” (Josephson, n.d., Introduction). The best ethical leadership programs work to provide a framework within which to evaluate those choices.

The International Public Safety Leadership and Ethics Institute (IPSLEI) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation organized in 2006 with the aim to begin to teach ethics in the early years of public safety providers’ careers, rather than waiting until the individual was promoted to a supervisory role.

This idea goes hand in hand with another tenet of public safety leadership, service orientation. Sargent Steve Papenfuhs in his column “Training to Think” on PoliceOne (2011) writes: “In order to eradicate many of the ethical dilemmas faced by public safety professionals, leadership must be service-centered.”

Public safety has sometimes been resistant to the service orientation, despite mantras of “To Protect and Serve.” No one has promoted the idea of service orientation with quite as much humor or insight as former Phoenix Arizona fire chief Alan Brunacini, famous for statements like, “Our essential mission and number one priority is to deliver the best possible service to our customers” and “regard everyone as a customer” (Brunacini, 1996). Brunacini was for the customer, but also for fire department members following their SOPs/mission statement/organizational values, acting professional, being team players, and having incident etiquette. Whether you love him or hate him, he changed the face of the fire service. In the 1980s when he began talking to the nation’s fire departments about his approach, few fire departments had a customer service orientation. The idea of internal and external customer service was at odds with the command-and-control model most public safety organizations were using.

In the 30 years since Brunacini first began sharing his ideas in a way that caught the attention of emergency services everywhere, our thinking has evolved across the board. Nowadays, all branches of public safety realize they do, indeed, have customers.

What Brunacini recognized was that the social climate changed in the 1980s and ’90s, with the private sector increasingly providing individualized service. In the 1960s, when a citizen called a neighbor on the phone, they called a “party line”—a telephone number shared by multiple households. By the 1980s, they called directly from their home to the neighbor’s home, and by 2005 they called directly from their individual portable cell phone to their neighbor’s. If you wanted to buy something in 1980, you had to wait for a store to open, and then you could buy what they had in stock or wait for weeks for a special order. By 2005, you could go on line at 4 am and order it to be delivered the next day via overnight delivery. Brunacini recognized that the private sector was increasingly able to deliver personalized service, and that in light of these sea changes in the way the world operates, citizens now expected citizen-centered service. It is no surprise that our customers, both external and internal, began to expect that the government would also deliver personalized service. Thanks to technology, the government is able to personalize much of the service provided. However, the attitude and orientation of our staff and leadership is now challenged to determine how to provide excellent customer service in departments often understaffed and underfunded.

Although many challenges that public safety leaders face have come into play in the latter part of the twentieth century, we still have the leadership challenge that has faced us since the beginnings of emergency services: that is, the challenge of emergencies. As part of our job, we must operate in very high-stakes, high-stress, emotional situations. At the same time, we spend the majority of our time completing very mundane tasks. Leading in this mixed environment can be its own challenge.

Here are some discipline-specific articles to read on future leadership challenges:

· Police leadership challenges in a changing world

· Applying proactive innovation to future service delivery models

· The Changing Face of Police Leadership

As you read through these papers, take time to think about a topic you may want to delve deeper into for your Case Study assignment .

References

Bomey, N., & Gallagher, J. (2013, 15 September). How Detroit went broke: The answers may surprise you - and don't blame Coleman Young. Detroit Free Press. Retrieved from http://www.freep.com/interactive/article/20130915/NEWS01/130801004/Detroit-Bankruptcy-history-1950-debt-pension-revenue

Brunacini, Alan. (1996). Essentials of Fire Department Customer Service. Stillwater, OK: Fire Protection Publications.

Campbell, N. (2006). Correctional leadership competencies for the 21st century: Manager and supervisor levels (NIC Accession Number 020475). Retrieved from U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of Corrections Information Center website: http://static.nicic.gov/Library/020475.pdf

Davis, R. C. (2012). Selected International Best Practices in Police Performance Measurement. Retrieved from RAND website: http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/technical_reports/2012/RAND_TR1153.pdf

Edwards, D., & Bienvenu, B. (2011). Cashing the public safety dividend: Re-Calibrating spending on police services in an era of declining crime rates [white paper]. Retrieved from IBM Global Business Services website: http://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/en/gbw03143usen/GBW03143USEN.PDF

Engleman, E., & Strohm, C. (2012, January 31). Cybersecurity disaster seen in U.S. survey citing spending gaps. Bloomberg. Retrieved from: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-31/cybersecurity-disaster-seen-in-u-s-survey-citing-spending-gaps.html

Hallman, T. (2013). Dallas Fire-Rescue EMS paramedics to make scheduled house calls [Blog post]. Retrieved from Dallas News website: http://cityhallblog.dallasnews.com/2013/11/dallas-fire-rescue-ems-paramedics-to-make-scheduled-house-calls.html/

James, N. (2013). The Federal Prison Population Buildup: Overview, Policy Changes, Issues, and Options. Congressional Research Services. Retrieved from http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42937.pdf

Josephson, Michael. (n.d.). Making Ethical Decisions [Booklet]. Los Angeles: Josephson Institute of Ethics.

Kean, T. H., & Hamilton, L. H. (2004). Public Statement—Release of 9/11 Commission Report. Retrieved from  http://archive.org/stream/911_final_report/911Report_Statement_djvu.txt

Malm, A., Pollard, N., Brantingham, P. [Paul], Tinsley, P., Plecas, D., Brantingham, P. [Patricia], … Kinney, B. (2005). A 30 year analysis of police service delivery and costing. International Centre for Urban Research Studies, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of the Fraser Valley. Retrieved from https://www.majorcitieschiefs.com/pdf/news/policeservicedeliverycosting.pdf

McDonald, Darren. (2013, August 12). New projects to promote research, data-driven decisions in Canadian fire service [Blog post]. Retrieved from UFV Today, the website of the University of the Fraser Valley: http://blogs.ufv.ca/blog/2013/08/new-projects-to-promote-research-data-driven-decisions-in-canadian-fire-service

Michigan Suburbs Alliance. (n.d.) Creating collaborative communities: Fire service. Retrieved from http://www.michigansuburbsalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/Fire_Service_Collaboration_How-To_Manual.pdf

Papenfuhs, Steve. (2011, April 6). Ethical dilemmas cops face daily. Retrieved from http://www.policeone.com/legal/articles/3467115-Ethical-dilemmas-cops-face-daily

Pew Charitable Trust. (2007). Public safety, public spending: Forecasting America’s prison population 2007–2011. Retrieved from http://www.pewstates.org/uploadedFiles/PCS_Assets/2007/Public%20Safety%20Public%20Spending.pdf

Raines, C., & Arnsparger, A. (2010). Millennials at Work [website]. Retrieved from http://www.generationsatwork.com/articles_millennials_at_work.php

Ramsay, G. (2011). Business Plan – Police Department. City of Duluth [MN]. Retrieved from http://www.duluthmn.gov/media/113007/2011-Police-Business-Plan_1.pdf