Holiday Stories

The City of Watertown decorates one of
their fire engines for the holidays.

It seems we remember the calls that happen on nights with a full moon or during the holiday season with even more clarity. As we have done in the past, we want to share a few “Holiday Stories”:

• Recently, local news sources reported about the Coon Rapids police officer who encountered a family with no money and who planned to sleep in their car on a 10-degree night. The officer was afraid the mother, father, and five small children would freeze if they slept in the car. He was not able to find a place for them in an emergency shelter. The officer got them to a local hotel and paid for the room himself. He has asked the department not to identify him by name.

• I was at the City of Savage’s main fire station a few days before Thanksgiving. Just as the training session was getting started, there was a knock at the door. It was a woman from the neighborhood who was bringing fresh-baked pies to the firefighters to thank them for their service to the community. She seemed embarrassed that the firefighters were thanking her. 

• I worked for a police chief who had obtained a confession from a bank robber earlier in his career. As with most interviews, the two got to know each other a little bit during their conversation. The chief had a style that made people want to talk to him—even bank robbers. The robber eventually went to federal prison, and every Christmas the chief got a Christmas card from the man in prison. He would post it on his office door and smile.

• Christmas Eve in 1983 was particularly cold and windy. I remember the high was -9F, and overnight it dropped to -25F. The wind and cold made it painful to be outside. It was so cold that churches canceled their Christmas Eve services due to the weather. I was working an overnight shift, and it was rare to see another car on the road. Then I drove up on a beat-up old car with a flat tire. The car was on the shoulder of the highway with a mom and three kids inside. If it is possible to look poor, they looked poor. They were trying to get to a relative’s house two hours away. They had no cash, but they had a spare tire, and it had air in it.
  
  An officer from a neighboring city, Dave, drove up to check on me. Apparently I was not hearing my radio, as it was buried under a couple of layers of quilted vests and my winter jacket. I had not responded to the dispatcher checking on me, and they sent Dave. Upon hearing this family’s plight, Dave said, “Shall we go for it?”
  
  With that being said, we moved the family into the two police cars and began to change the tire. It was so cold that Dave would work a minute and then run back to his car, then I would run to the car and pick up where Dave left off. It was often just a few turns of the lug wrench and then back to the car to warm up. We kept that tag-team system going and would tell each other how much progress we made as we passed each other. The kids loved it and laughed as they watched us race back and forth. We had them on their way again in about a half hour.
  
  Dave has retired, and when I saw him recently we reminisced about the family with the flat tire. Imagine all the stuff we had seen and experienced in our two police careers, and it is interesting that we like to remember the family with the flat tire on Christmas Eve. 

Up next: A Dividend for LMCIT Members!

Stay safe and happy holidays,
Rob

What’s Up With Line-Ups?

The training recommends photos be
shown to eyewitnesses one at a time.

Some of you may remember this was the title of one our Safety & Loss Control Workshops last spring. The session focused on the forensic science that has led to new standards for police in handling line-ups and show-ups. As many of you know, some witnesses immediately recognize the subject, and many do not. A great deal has been learned about eyewitness identifications reliability and unreliability. Much of the data came from studying the factors that lead to wrongful incarcerations of innocent people. And the research has shown that in 75% of the wrongful incarcerations, the factor that led to the conviction was a mistake of an eyewitness identification.

Very few crime victims or eyewitnesses wake up in the morning knowing they are going to witness a crime that day. And their recollection of what happened—or of the suspect’s description—can be influenced by a variety of factors. Many of these crimes happen at night, they happen fast, and a witness’s own implicated bias may affect what they remember. 

The International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) has a great online training program on this topic, and it is perfect for roll calls training or training sessions. The training is based on the IACP model policy and recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences. The training modules are about five minutes long and begin with a compelling story of a wrongful incarceration and its consequences. The training walks officers through the process for their initial response, show-ups, photo arrays, and live line-ups.

This process is the standard for most jurisdictions, and it is important for patrol officers as well as investigators. You can access the training online here.

Up next: Holiday Stories

Stay safe,
Rob

Work Comp Statistics

The League of Minnesota Cities Insurance Trust (LMCIT) is the provider of workers’ compensation coverage for almost all the cities in Minnesota. I thought our readers would be interested in a few statistics from a recent LMCIT Board update.

Police Losses was the heading that caught my eye. It read, “Police losses continue to be the largest cost component of the workers’ compensation program, which from 2013-16 represented 31% of all costs and averaged $6.8 million per year. Recent data shows that over a quarter of injuries to police resulting in lost time occur when apprehending a suspect and foot pursuits”. If that looks familiar, you may have seen a similar conclusion in the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) national study on reducing officer injuries.

The chart below shows both the number of claims and costs going back to 2009. The data for 2017 will be coming in well into 2018.

Under the heading of Fire (Paid & Volunteer) Losses, the text read: “Paid and volunteer firefighter losses accounted for 20% of all incurred loss costs during 2013-16. From 2009 –June 2017, the most significant causes of injury attributed to lost time claims are due to lifting, pushing and pulling activities (36%), and falling or slipping (26%). An analysis of older claims (2009-12) shows that firefighters are injured most at fire scenes (37%), when providing emergency medical services (25%), performing fire station maintenance (14%), and during training (13%).Volunteer firefighters account for 60% of all loss costs, with paid firefighters accounting for 40%.

In the chart below, note the increase in the number of work comp claims in 2016 but a decrease in cost. It appears the decrease in cost was due to fewer serious injuries that year. 

While we need to be careful about drawing conclusions from this data, we do know a couple of things. Public Safety (police and fire) makes up 51% of the total LMCIT work comp cost. That’s a big number—it is costly and, most importantly, it is our membership being injured on the job. Most of these injures continue to occur while our responders are engaged in activities that have historically and predictably caused injury. For police, it is taking people into custody, and for fire it is lifting, pulling and pushing, and slipping and falling at fire calls and EMS scenes. And, the 2016 numbers for fire work comp look encouraging. 

Public safety and emergency work has risk, and we know the activities where a majority of the injuries occur. Concentrate your safety efforts and awareness on what the numbers are telling us.

Up next: Eyewitness Identifications—Training Designed for Roll Calls

 

Stay safe (as I write this, snow is falling over much of the state. This winter, slow down, watch out for each other, and keep safety on your mind),

Rob