June 2009 Archives

When the police, fire fighters and paramedics stumble in their response to emergencies the cause may be a mix of the wrong technology, politics and organizational culture.

Toronto Fire Services, the city's fire department, was recently the subject of an investigative article in the Toronto Star which revealed among other things a less than adequate response time, as well as, typically, officials defensive in face of media inquiries.

One of the worst local disasters in recent memory in the Canadian city occurred last summer with a series of gas explosions and resultant fires in the north end at Sunrise Propane, resulting in two deaths and the temporary evacuation of thousands of people in surrounding neighborhoods.

While the situation could have been much worse in terms of casualties much of the local media and political attention was understandably focused on the safety practices of the owners of the propane site and lax provincial government regulations.

Now, almost a year later, the Star's reporter Kevin Donovan revealed that it took more than nine minutes before the first Toronto Fire Services pumper truck made it to the blast site, just over one mile from the station house.

This was not an isolated incident last year in Toronto. In two other fires in residential communities, fire fighters arrived ten minutes or more at one home after the police and ambulance had already arrived following a 9-1-1 call; and in a second home blaze fire fighters arrived nine or more minutes later -- despite being a little more than a mile from the nearest fire station.

Donovan does mention another shocking detail -- before the amalgamation in 1998 of Toronto with surrounding municipalities, the city of Toronto's original fire department had a good dispatch system but it was replaced by a more archaic dispatch system from the neighboring city of North York in the establishment of new larger metropolitan government -- incidentally headed by the former North York mayor, Mel Lastman.

What surprises criminologist Carrie Sanders in the Star's reporting is that the Toronto fire department has been relying on a dispatch system that was originally designed for police forces."It is being designed for one use and being adapted for a completely different organization, which requires more time, which then requires more work."

An assistant professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Sanders did her recent PhD thesis on the responses of police, fire fighters and paramedics to emergencies in two separate Canadian communities and the role that technology plays in the process.

The other glaring item at the Toronto fire department, as reported, is the lack of a GPS system which would allow the dispatchers to keep on top of their vehicles on the road or in the fire station. Instead, the dispatchers rely on a paper map on a metal board.

Sanders agrees it is hard to generalize about fire departments across North America. Some are using the latest available computerized dispatch systems; others are not.

A number of factors will influence the ability of city fire departments to respond to emergencies, she adds. "It would be dependent upon a number of factors such as available funding, organizational structure (i.e. volunteer versus paid) and location -- urban center versus municipal department."

Of course, Toronto is the largest city in Canada and presumably the most sophisticated. Maybe in some things like culture and urban planning, but certainly not its fire department.

Welcome to Frontline where I will be discussing the latest trends in policing, security and emergency responder technology.

I am investigating the latest gizmos, gadgets and software in professions that are not necessarily early adopters or the most up to date on technology.

My focus will be on the trends, the success stories and the misfires. As Peter Manning, the sociologist and author of The Technology of Policing -- Crime Mapping, Information Technology and the Rationality of Crime Control,  noted in a recent interview, the police, for one, are like the rest of us -- "subject to fads and fashions, and anxious to be up to date."

He argues that policing in the 21st century continues to be largely a face to face occupation where the emphasis is on talking to people and getting a handle on what is happening on the street.

Maybe it is not surprising that paper file folders predominant in the cop shop when it comes to maintaining case details. The problem is that in areas like vice and drugs, what gets stored can be very partial (based on what interests the individual officer) and is generally not part of any centralized repository of accumulated knowledge in the police operation, observes Manning

At the same time mobile digital terminals, keyboards and screens are standard in squad cars across North America and connected to the office and various internal operational databases.

Where IT can really work is in the sharing and communicating of information inside law enforcement and emergency responders. Sadly, this remains scandalously a rather undeveloped area in the US because of incompatibility of systems both within individual policing operations and among the various forces including the FBI.

"National databases are not updated. They are not cleaned up; they are not organized in any systemic fashion," says Manning.

Indeed, there is great emphasis at times on more questionable solutions. One example cited by the professor is an audio system that is planted by the local police in selected neighborhoods in Boston, for instance, to capture the sound of gun shots. But some suspicious sounds are not easily traceable. The result, he reports, is an overloading of false positives of what turn out to be not guns shots in the police communication centers and hence greater aggravation for the patrol officers in the field.

Invariably, most cops have some kind of college education and are familiar with personal computers. Same situation exists with the senior brass, says Manning.

But it is the sergeants in the middle management in the police who actually run things that are least amendable to computers or fail to apply hardware and software in a systematic manner.

"They are a little frightened, a little worried. They don't want to look stupid," says Manning. "It may be age or previous educational level."

Like a lot of us who only use a portion of Microsoft Word the police will underutilize the technology thrown their way.

"The everyday police work of the detective, the patrol officers and special squadrons have not changed one iota. The technology is embedded in the practices of the occupation. Maybe it makes [the work go] faster," the professor concludes.