Who doesn't love the fire service? A few years ago, an article in USA Today stated that firefighters were among the most trustworthy and credible public servants. As a result, you can hardly turn on a TV set or look at a magazine anymore without seeing a firefighter used to market a product. The insurance industry figured this out decades ago when it started employing the firefighter's helmet in sales materials. One particular gasoline company has sold a lot of gas because it claimed the fire chief used it.

If everybody loves us so much, why don't they do what we want them to do? It's because love and respect are two different aspects of the relationship between the fire service and the community it serves. One doesn't necessarily lead to the other. For example, have you tried to go Code 3 through your community recently? I have. One of my battalion chiefs had a structure fire the other morning, so I jumped in the vehicle with him to see what it was like out on the streets. To say that it's a jungle is an exaggeration, but it certainly isn't a place where we get respect. As we were going down the highway, red lights and siren blaring, I actually witnessed people try to beat us to the intersection so they wouldn't have to pull over to the right.

And recently I have been on a few fires in which the behavior of the people was downright contradictory to what we have been telling the community. For example, I went on a call to a boat explosion the other morning. An individual was pouring gasoline in a boat in his garage. An ignition source in the garage started the fire, which removed all the hair on the man's face and earned him a ride to the hospital. Once again, people wouldn't get out of our way. The person who had engaged in that inappropriate behavior had very likely been exposed to public education efforts by the fire service, but he didn't get it.

Why isn't our message working better? Maybe it's because we're more concerned with people liking us than doing what we want them to do. Much of the effort put into programs to make contact with members of our community isn't all that powerful. We have convinced society that we're good people and that people should do what we want them to do, but in a lot of cases we haven't really made them realize the seriousness of the stakes.

One of my tests of public education is to look at a fire department's budget. How much of its resources go into making contacts in the community? Granted, a full-time public educator is a luxury few fire departments can afford. We often haven't made a good case for justifying that position because we've been hard-pressed to statistically prove it makes any difference. I had a very close personal friend who was a public educator who became very irritated when I told her that her job was likely to be on the chopping block every time budget season rolled around. This individual had an emotional and professional commitment to public education that was extraordinary; she simply couldn't understand why a fire chief wouldn't support public education.

It's not that I don't support public education; the problem is the incredible difficulty in tight budget times to get everybody in the fire community to understand the difference an educator can make. For example, how do you explain to a fire captain that he might have fewer personnel on his apparatus because you are trying to keep someone talking to the students in a grade school? That story doesn't wash with fire suppression people. Yet the reality is that person who is meeting with students and senior citizens and helping shape a community's attitude about moving to the right for sirens and lights is every bit as much a part of the team as the person wearing turnout on the fire apparatus.

Another way to evaluate the commitment to public education is to look at whether the department develops its own public-education material or buys commercially available materials. There's a significant difference between commercially available and locally produced material, and the biggest distinction is specificity. Granted, many national programs have had a significant impact on communities, but local materials generally can elicit better response than generic ones. In this day of page-design and photo-editing software, every fire department has the capacity to create public-education materials, but it won't happen unless it's an organizational priority. Unfortunately, in many cases, it simply isn't.

Let's go back to the basic question. How do you want members of your community to support your fire department? What behaviors do you wish them to exhibit in mitigation and/or cooperation when an emergency occurs? Don't be so quick to think that you know the answers to those questions. Frankly, there are hundreds of messages that can be crammed into those specific inquiries.

Moreover, you may be facing an impossible task depending on the complexity and diversity of your community. Generally, getting people to respond appropriately to lights and sirens takes a huge public-education effort. I have seen fire departments spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to put Opticoms in their intersections to improve response times, only to see a device developed that John Q. Citizen can install in his car so he can run the intersection as easily as the responding emergency services vehicle. Where do you go to educate people about that? The answer is that you can't. Isn't the basic issue that we need to have the public understand why we need people to get out of our way when we have an emergency so that we can meet our response time goals?

Let me go to an even more basic area. How many of you have seen a huge increase in the number of people using 911 to get help for things that have nothing to do with emergencies? On my bulletin board, I have a series of conversations that have been documented by dispatchers.

Dispatcher: 911. What is your emergency?

Caller: Someone broke into my house and took a bite out of my sandwich.

Dispatcher: Excuse me?

Caller: I made a ham-and-cheese sandwich and left it on the kitchen table, and when I came back from the bathroom, someone had taken a bite out of it.

Dispatcher: Was anything else taken?

Caller: No, but this has happened to me before, and I'm sick and tired of it.

Dispatcher: 911.

Caller: Hi, is this the police?

Dispatcher: This is 911. Do you need police assistance?

Caller: Well, I don't know who to call. Can you tell me how to cook a turkey? I've never cooked one before.

Dispatcher: What is your emergency?

Caller: I heard what sounded like gunshots coming from the brown house on the corner.

Dispatcher: Do you have an address?

Caller: No, I'm wearing a blouse and slacks.

Dispatcher: 911.

Caller: Yeah, I'm all out of breath — I think I'm going to pass out.

Dispatcher: Sir, where are you calling from?

Caller: I'm at a pay phone. North and Foster.

Dispatcher: Sir, an ambulance is on the way. Are you an asthmatic?

Caller: No.

Dispatcher: What where you doing before you started having trouble breathing?

Caller: Running from the police.

There are plenty more. While it may seem funny that people are so inadequately informed about the purpose of that emergency number, it continues to be a problem in many of our communities. System overload can result in call-queuing and resource allocation problems that cost the community millions of dollars.

So here are our choices. We can continue to do everything we have done in the past, and we can choose to remain angry and frustrated about these items. Or we can choose to try to do something about them. The latter option has two components. The first is commitment of resources; the second is a philosophical commitment to not give up on the problem.

Philosophical commitment

As I peruse fire departments' strategic plans and even annual work plans, I seldom see much dialogue about public education. Sometimes it's buried in the fire prevention bureau. Sometimes it's alluded to in the fire chief's office. We need to have a public-education goal for most of our fire departments if we are going to do anything at all about identifying appropriate behaviors in the communities we serve.

Establishing that goal and putting down performance measures that are consistent with our goal is a major step in almost any fire organization. The performance metrics of public education are not as well-defined as our emergency response capabilities, yet we can set some criteria.

For example, if we intend to change the community's attitude, we need to have contact with people. The contact hours accumulated by elements of our public-education program should be evaluated. A huge metropolitan fire department is unlikely to get to everybody, but in a smaller community, it's possible that by keeping track of your citizen contact over a period of years you can make an impression on them.

Resource commitment

Public educators' jobs aren't easy to justify, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. I believe as organizations become larger and have an economic footprint that supports more staff, fire chiefs should be evaluating if a public educator can shape the nature of their community fire problem. Now if that sounds to you like what it means to most people, don't be alarmed. Does it mean only the best-funded and largest fire departments can afford public educators? No.

There are many fire departments that could have a public educator but choose not to. There are many fire departments squeaking by in the budget arena that have chosen to put a public educator on salary. That's where the fire chief comes in and where goal orientation and mission alignment come in. Of course, the balancing act is typical of many fire departments' economic environment. How much is too much and how little is too little? We keep hearing that we're supposed to be more creative in our resolution of problems. Therefore, it may be that a department can't afford a full-time person, but the commitment could be made to develop materials, cooperate and coordinate with community education efforts, and establish a performance metric for public education in spite of severe limitations.

Unfortunately, there's always the old argument that if we educate people to do everything safely, there will be no justification for a fire department. What a load of poppycock! My library contains many references to public education that go back to the 1880s, and yet the fire service today is huge. We can't possibly eliminate human frailty. We can't possibly eliminate technological failure. But we do have a moral obligation to do everything we can to reduce the impact on the very people we have been sworn to serve.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could actually have a year go by in which there were no fatalities from a smoke detector battery not working? Wouldn't it be great to go to a series of automobile accidents where no one died because their seatbelts were unbuckled? Wouldn't it be satisfying to go down the street Code 3 and have 99% of the people get out of your way rather than 75%?

In the final analysis, fire service public education is not about making sure that people love the fire service, but rather that they love life. It's a partnership between us and the communities we serve. If we can get them to incorporate behaviors that result in us being able to do our jobs much more successfully, more of them may live. I for one would be extremely happy if we could just get people to comply with the fire code without having to spend huge amounts of energy trying to get them to do so.

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With more than 40 years in the fire service, Ronny J. Coleman has served as fire chief in Fullerton and San Clemente, Calif., and was the fire marshal of the State of California from 1992 to 1999. He is a certified fire chief and a master instructor in the California Fire Service Training and Education System. A Fellow of the Institution of Fire Engineers, he has an associate's degree in fire science, a bachelor's degree in political science and a master's degree in vocational education.