abaduck

abaduck - Mike Ross, he doesn't hide is name, is, for the record, a registered Republican, more libertarian than anything else. Certainly not a liberal. He didn't respond earlier because he's spent the day at the FTC doing rescue tech, and joined in the good-natured banter involving one of the other students, an LEO.
He's so anti-police that he was in the in the middle of joining the police, as a volunteer cop in the UK, before that was cut short by our moving to the USA. He's given serious thought to joining the volunteer PSEF here in Westchester, but has back-burnered that due to too many other commitments.
Yes, sometimes I debate - I have questions and opinions about police actions on occasions. About the only time I think I could be said to have been out of line was the recent thread on the Philly open carry guy, and enough LEOs here told me how and why I was wrong I manned up, said OK I was wrong, and apologised.
All I wanted to do was update people on what was happening; a lot of people discussed this case, and a story on the latest developments caught my eye. I often end up reading something and someplace down the line it's 'I wonder what happened about X? How did that play out?'
That's all there was to it. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and JJB531, I respectfully think you're out of line here.
Mike

I dont think you can fairly judge what his intentions are, this seemed like a relatively harmless post. On the other hand your statements were right off the bat argumentative and attacking. We should be looking at incidents like this and having a healthy albeit heated discussion in the aims of preventing similar situations from developing in the field. It shouldn't be about placing blame and who is right or wrong but how we can improve. That is one of the great things about this website, it allows the different sectors in the emergency services come together and talk about issues and open communication. Of course officer safety should be an important topic to you as is FF and EMS safety is to me, I respect that you are passionate about it.

abaduck - Mike Ross, he doesn't hide is name, is, for the record, a registered Republican, more libertarian than anything else. Certainly not a liberal. He didn't respond earlier because he's spent the day at the FTC doing rescue tech, and joined in the good-natured banter involving one of the other students, an LEO.
He's so anti-police that he was in the in the middle of joining the police, as a volunteer cop in the UK, before that was cut short by our moving to the USA. He's given serious thought to joining the volunteer PSEF here in Westchester, but has back-burnered that due to too many other commitments.
Yes, sometimes I debate - I have questions and opinions about police actions on occasions. About the only time I think I could be said to have been out of line was the recent thread on the Philly open carry guy, and enough LEOs here told me how and why I was wrong I manned up, said OK I was wrong, and apologised.
All I wanted to do was update people on what was happening; a lot of people discussed this case, and a story on the latest developments caught my eye. I often end up reading something and someplace down the line it's 'I wonder what happened about X? How did that play out?'
That's all there was to it. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and JJB531, I respectfully think you're out of line here.
Mike

abaduck - Mike Ross, he doesn't hide is name, is, for the record, a registered Republican, more libertarian than anything else. Certainly not a liberal. He didn't respond earlier because he's spent the day at the FTC doing rescue tech, and joined in the good-natured banter involving one of the other students, an LEO.
He's so anti-police that he was in the in the middle of joining the police, as a volunteer cop in the UK, before that was cut short by our moving to the USA. He's given serious thought to joining the volunteer PSEF here in Westchester, but has back-burnered that due to too many other commitments.
Yes, sometimes I debate - I have questions and opinions about police actions on occasions. About the only time I think I could be said to have been out of line was the recent thread on the Philly open carry guy, and enough LEOs here told me how and why I was wrong I manned up, said OK I was wrong, and apologised.
All I wanted to do was update people on what was happening; a lot of people discussed this case, and a story on the latest developments caught my eye. I often end up reading something and someplace down the line it's 'I wonder what happened about X? How did that play out?'
That's all there was to it. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and JJB531, I respectfully think you're out of line here.
Mike

Interesting on many levels; I'm a photographer as well as a fireman. I can't understand how it can be lawful to photograph or video anyone in public, but only so long as you don't record their voice. That's such an unwarranted 1st amendment prior restraint that I can't imagine for an instant it's constitutional; I'm astonished they passed it and even more astonished they're trying to enforce it.
Or maybe not; I've been warned about Chicago. Ask any aviator about Meigs Field. Heinlein knew what he was talking about when he featured the despotic 'Chicago Imperium' in one of his books!
My personal 'What the $%($' moment was:
"earlier this year, for example, former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison for lying under oath about his role in the routine torture of hundreds of suspects in police interrogation rooms for more than a decade. Nearly everyone else involved in the tortures, including the police commanders and prosecutors who helped cover them up, couldn't be prosecuted due to statutes of limitations."


There's a statute of limitations for *torture*?!!


Mike

Seriously dude!?! You need someone else to tell you that it's NOT okay for you to have a teenage boy fondle your junk? So if your town didn't provide you with that "training" you'd have no idea that this is wrong? Your way of thinking (find someone else to blame/failure to accept responsibility) is exactly what's wrong with this country.

What can we take from this?
-Sometimes you have to imagine how things will play out in the paper and the damage that can be done to the reputation of your orginization.
-If your an officer be the officer. It is your job to be the voice of reason when things get out of hand.
-It's 2011 this is how things are we are not going back to the old days.
The alleged conduct is both illegal and sick. Instead of making this thread another gripe about a black eye for the fire service lets try to be vigilant and do our jobs and make the tough decisions to keep or orginizations on the level.

Date: 06/04/11
Time: 0746
Location: 460 Morris Park Ave (front of NYPD Transit District 12)
Frequency:
Units Operating: Engine 45 Ladder 38 Truck 58 Squad 41 & 61 Rescue 3 NYPD ESU
Weather Conditions: cloudy
Description Of Incident: SUV traveling northbound on the Bronx River Parkway left the roadway and fell approximately 40 feet landing in the front parking lot of TD 12. SUV struck a fence and then came to rest on top of the midnight platoon commander's personal truck. The driver walked away from crash, and front passenger removed by NYPD TD 12 officers due to gas leaking from vehicle. Photos to follow when I get home.
Reporters/Writer: grumpyFF (ON SCENE)
Link to photos on EMTBravo.net

I'm entirely sympathetic to the problem, but if an agency tried to suspend me on that basis - simply that I was one of the people who had been there in a certain time window - I would resign forthwith. You do NOT punish the innocent to get the guilty. In school I once had a teacher try to give me a punishment, as part of a class collective punishment, for something I had not done. I refused point-blank, and I both taught & learned a lesson about justice, and standing up for yourself when you know you're in the right.
Sorry, but this is a subject I've always felt strongly about.
Mike

I'm entirely sympathetic to the problem, but if an agency tried to suspend me on that basis - simply that I was one of the people who had been there in a certain time window - I would resign forthwith. You do NOT punish the innocent to get the guilty. In school I once had a teacher try to give me a punishment, as part of a class collective punishment, for something I had not done. I refused point-blank, and I both taught & learned a lesson about justice, and standing up for yourself when you know you're in the right.
Sorry, but this is a subject I've always felt strongly about.
Mike

@ JFLYNN, Cogs, & 16fire5:
I think the big lesson to take from the UK system is that they do 'more with less' on three fronts:
1. Big organisations: nothing smaller than a county, some cover several counties - hell, Strathclyde covers at least ten counties as far as I can remember, including the large city of Glasgow + suburbs. So you get significant economies of scale, and central planning and allocation of resources; I haven't counted number, but I get the strong impression they manage with a lot less apparatus per head of population than we do. That's probably the single biggest factor.
2. Less people: retained or wholetime, UK seems to run light by American standards. And yes there tend to be fewer retained members, as compared with American volunteers, but they do tend to be extremely active.
3. Less water! Yes they do still mount an interior attack with something strongly resembling a booster reel, but building construction plays a large part here; not much wood frame, traditional British houses tend to be what we would call ordinary construction. So a generally lower fire load, both in terms of structure and contents. UK tactics are big on what they call "quick water" - aiming to have water on the fire in well under a minute from arriving at the structure, and gas cooling tactics.
I wouldn't make so much of the difference between retained & volunteer; in my view the huge organisational differences between UK & USA are the most important. If you see merit in the UK system, the first thing to do is consolidate at nothing smaller than the county level - then start thinking about terms of service.
Mike

This story makes me very happy about one point - I don't live anywhere near Chicago. This is absurd and totally demoralizing to all the men and women who took and passed the exam to become firefighters.
I wonder how the judge would feel if she was passed over for law school with a score of 89 so that a person with a score of 64 could take her seat.
I guess this means they better start passing out diplomas to those who failed out of HS also because apparently grades don't matter.

@ JFLYNN, Cogs, & 16fire5:
I think the big lesson to take from the UK system is that they do 'more with less' on three fronts:
1. Big organisations: nothing smaller than a county, some cover several counties - hell, Strathclyde covers at least ten counties as far as I can remember, including the large city of Glasgow + suburbs. So you get significant economies of scale, and central planning and allocation of resources; I haven't counted number, but I get the strong impression they manage with a lot less apparatus per head of population than we do. That's probably the single biggest factor.
2. Less people: retained or wholetime, UK seems to run light by American standards. And yes there tend to be fewer retained members, as compared with American volunteers, but they do tend to be extremely active.
3. Less water! Yes they do still mount an interior attack with something strongly resembling a booster reel, but building construction plays a large part here; not much wood frame, traditional British houses tend to be what we would call ordinary construction. So a generally lower fire load, both in terms of structure and contents. UK tactics are big on what they call "quick water" - aiming to have water on the fire in well under a minute from arriving at the structure, and gas cooling tactics.
I wouldn't make so much of the difference between retained & volunteer; in my view the huge organisational differences between UK & USA are the most important. If you see merit in the UK system, the first thing to do is consolidate at nothing smaller than the county level - then start thinking about terms of service.
Mike

I'll bite, and tell you about the UK.
The UK doesn't have fire departments; they have fire brigades, and a brigade doesn't cover an area smaller than a county. Some have amalgamated and cover more than one county. So, no local fire departments in the American sense. This has been the case for a very long time - certainly from the second world war, when all existing firefighting resources were, in effect, nationalized, and there was a single National Fire Service for the duration of the war. This big difference, that during the war the North American continent never came under direct attack, whilst the UK was bombed heavily, is mostly responsible for the organizational differences.
Are there volunteers? Yes, there are a very few areas - mostly very remote rural areas with exceedingly low call volumes - in the brigades where 'first aid' fire cover is provided by pure volunteers. Usually they don't have apparatus or SCBA, perhaps just a trailer with basic equipment, maybe some buckets, a portable pump & hose etc.
For the vast, vast majority of the country, the firefighters are not volunteers; they are 'wholetime' or 'retained'.
'Wholetime' means what we would call 'career' - exactly the same as here.
'Retained' firefighters operate a bit like our volunteers - they have day jobs and carry pagers. When the tones drop, they respond to the fire station and get the apparatus out. But they're paid. They're paid an annual bounty or 'retainer' - hence 'retained' - and they're paid at union hourly rates for time spent training and responding to calls. And they have specific duty hours when they're contractually obliged to respond to all calls; they 'clock in' and 'clock out' of their duty hours by cellphone or computer.
They're more like part-time career firefighters, and they can and do join the union. Training is similar for both. So it's more than just 'paid per call'.
Obviously big cities are staffed entirely by 'wholetime' firefighters, and 'retained' firefighters are in smaller towns and rural areas. As far as I know, there are no mixed crews of retained & wholetime firefighters on the same apparatus - so no combo departments as we would think of them. What you do sometimes get is a fire station with a wholetime dayshift and a retained nightshift, for instance.
Oh, and UK firefighters do not do EMS; the ambulance/paramedic service is entirely separate, run by the NHS.
Hope that helps.
Mike

I'll bite, and tell you about the UK.
The UK doesn't have fire departments; they have fire brigades, and a brigade doesn't cover an area smaller than a county. Some have amalgamated and cover more than one county. So, no local fire departments in the American sense. This has been the case for a very long time - certainly from the second world war, when all existing firefighting resources were, in effect, nationalized, and there was a single National Fire Service for the duration of the war. This big difference, that during the war the North American continent never came under direct attack, whilst the UK was bombed heavily, is mostly responsible for the organizational differences.
Are there volunteers? Yes, there are a very few areas - mostly very remote rural areas with exceedingly low call volumes - in the brigades where 'first aid' fire cover is provided by pure volunteers. Usually they don't have apparatus or SCBA, perhaps just a trailer with basic equipment, maybe some buckets, a portable pump & hose etc.
For the vast, vast majority of the country, the firefighters are not volunteers; they are 'wholetime' or 'retained'.
'Wholetime' means what we would call 'career' - exactly the same as here.
'Retained' firefighters operate a bit like our volunteers - they have day jobs and carry pagers. When the tones drop, they respond to the fire station and get the apparatus out. But they're paid. They're paid an annual bounty or 'retainer' - hence 'retained' - and they're paid at union hourly rates for time spent training and responding to calls. And they have specific duty hours when they're contractually obliged to respond to all calls; they 'clock in' and 'clock out' of their duty hours by cellphone or computer.
They're more like part-time career firefighters, and they can and do join the union. Training is similar for both. So it's more than just 'paid per call'.
Obviously big cities are staffed entirely by 'wholetime' firefighters, and 'retained' firefighters are in smaller towns and rural areas. As far as I know, there are no mixed crews of retained & wholetime firefighters on the same apparatus - so no combo departments as we would think of them. What you do sometimes get is a fire station with a wholetime dayshift and a retained nightshift, for instance.
Oh, and UK firefighters do not do EMS; the ambulance/paramedic service is entirely separate, run by the NHS.
Hope that helps.
Mike

I'll bite, and tell you about the UK.
The UK doesn't have fire departments; they have fire brigades, and a brigade doesn't cover an area smaller than a county. Some have amalgamated and cover more than one county. So, no local fire departments in the American sense. This has been the case for a very long time - certainly from the second world war, when all existing firefighting resources were, in effect, nationalized, and there was a single National Fire Service for the duration of the war. This big difference, that during the war the North American continent never came under direct attack, whilst the UK was bombed heavily, is mostly responsible for the organizational differences.
Are there volunteers? Yes, there are a very few areas - mostly very remote rural areas with exceedingly low call volumes - in the brigades where 'first aid' fire cover is provided by pure volunteers. Usually they don't have apparatus or SCBA, perhaps just a trailer with basic equipment, maybe some buckets, a portable pump & hose etc.
For the vast, vast majority of the country, the firefighters are not volunteers; they are 'wholetime' or 'retained'.
'Wholetime' means what we would call 'career' - exactly the same as here.
'Retained' firefighters operate a bit like our volunteers - they have day jobs and carry pagers. When the tones drop, they respond to the fire station and get the apparatus out. But they're paid. They're paid an annual bounty or 'retainer' - hence 'retained' - and they're paid at union hourly rates for time spent training and responding to calls. And they have specific duty hours when they're contractually obliged to respond to all calls; they 'clock in' and 'clock out' of their duty hours by cellphone or computer.
They're more like part-time career firefighters, and they can and do join the union. Training is similar for both. So it's more than just 'paid per call'.
Obviously big cities are staffed entirely by 'wholetime' firefighters, and 'retained' firefighters are in smaller towns and rural areas. As far as I know, there are no mixed crews of retained & wholetime firefighters on the same apparatus - so no combo departments as we would think of them. What you do sometimes get is a fire station with a wholetime dayshift and a retained nightshift, for instance.
Oh, and UK firefighters do not do EMS; the ambulance/paramedic service is entirely separate, run by the NHS.
Hope that helps.
Mike

David Letterman's top 10 list of Bin Laden's last words. As he answered the door he said ' I need all these Navy Seals like I need a hole in my head' !!!

Henry's family should be PAYING the Police Officer $120 million, not suing for it. There son attempted to murder Police Officers and placed other innocent persons in grave danger by attempting to run over the Police Officers while driving drunk. The Henry family should be hanging their heads in shame and owe the Police Officers an apology for the criminal actions of their son.

Mike

"A DMV spokesman said the traffic tickets never expire, and the town can still proceed with suspending people's licenses, even if the violations are years old."


Now that ain't justice; how in hell can anyone be expected to remember or contest a ticket from 1993?!


If the town let the ball drop for so long I think they're on a hiding to nothing. Better systems need to be put in place. My wife recently thought she had lost her license (I found it in the washing machine!) and went on the DMV website to request a replacement. It said 'no dice, your license is suspended'. WHAT?!


Turns out she had had a ticket for something trivial - expired registration or something - and the town (Scarsdale) had never cashed the check, and promptly had her license suspended instead. She was NEVER notified of any of this and had unknowingly been driving on a suspended license for two years. It should absolutely NOT be possible to suspend a license without a court appearance; that's bad and wrong. Only by a judge, and only in person.


Mike

Hmmm.
I used to work in a village just outside the small market town of Royston, England. Very nice sleepy little market town, not much crime.
The police there recently announced they had been approved for a pilot project; Royston is to be the first town entirely ringed by cameras. Automatic plate recognition cameras on every single road in and out of the town. All vehicle movements to be logged in a database. They actually said in the local paper they were proud and pleased that the movements of every car would be monitored and logged, and no-one would be able to enter or leave town without them knowing about it and recording it.
It's called the 'database state'. Be VERY careful where this road leads to. It's hugely controversial in the UK, where surveillance has gone considerably further than in the USA. http://www.bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/home/2011/03/britains-first-town-with-nowhere-to-hide.html
As I said when I heard about the Royston situation... '1984' was a WARNING, not a bloody INSTRUCTION MANUAL!
Mike

Does suspension get the accused into court? It certainly didn't in my wife's case, because there was no notification. At the very least there should be some automatic escalation in cases where a license is suspended in absentia, so that if a suspension isn't resolved in, say, two weeks, a reminder is issued, another two weeks a demand to surrender the license to DMV is issued by registered mail, another two weeks a warrant for arrest.
As it is, Scarsdale claimed they 'should have' sent ONE letter by regular mail - which we absolutely did not receive - and they then ignored it for two years until we found out by chance.
So she had been driving suspended, illegally but entirely innocently, she could have been arrested for that, it probably voided her insurance, it would definitely have caused a big problem at her citizenship interview (due in a few weeks) and if she *had* been arrested it would have caused an even bigger problem there. She works in a position of trust in the financial industry, and ANY record of arrest would take a lot of explaining and could be career-limiting. There is NO excuse for a system which permits such mistakes to happen and such serious problems to arise.
I like the UK system; for any situation for which a suspension of license is possible, the accused is *required* to appear in court, in person, with their license. The license is then physically taken off them in court, so the situation that affected my wife could never arise. If they don't show in court, a warrant for arrest is issued, and the police will pick them up and hold them or bail them to another date. If it's a minor administrative offence, like expired registration or inspection, for which suspension can't be imposed as a punishment, it can't be imposed for failing to pay the fine either; it's collected as a civil debt.
Mike

"A DMV spokesman said the traffic tickets never expire, and the town can still proceed with suspending people's licenses, even if the violations are years old."


Now that ain't justice; how in hell can anyone be expected to remember or contest a ticket from 1993?!


If the town let the ball drop for so long I think they're on a hiding to nothing. Better systems need to be put in place. My wife recently thought she had lost her license (I found it in the washing machine!) and went on the DMV website to request a replacement. It said 'no dice, your license is suspended'. WHAT?!


Turns out she had had a ticket for something trivial - expired registration or something - and the town (Scarsdale) had never cashed the check, and promptly had her license suspended instead. She was NEVER notified of any of this and had unknowingly been driving on a suspended license for two years. It should absolutely NOT be possible to suspend a license without a court appearance; that's bad and wrong. Only by a judge, and only in person.


Mike

"A DMV spokesman said the traffic tickets never expire, and the town can still proceed with suspending people's licenses, even if the violations are years old."


Now that ain't justice; how in hell can anyone be expected to remember or contest a ticket from 1993?!


If the town let the ball drop for so long I think they're on a hiding to nothing. Better systems need to be put in place. My wife recently thought she had lost her license (I found it in the washing machine!) and went on the DMV website to request a replacement. It said 'no dice, your license is suspended'. WHAT?!


Turns out she had had a ticket for something trivial - expired registration or something - and the town (Scarsdale) had never cashed the check, and promptly had her license suspended instead. She was NEVER notified of any of this and had unknowingly been driving on a suspended license for two years. It should absolutely NOT be possible to suspend a license without a court appearance; that's bad and wrong. Only by a judge, and only in person.


Mike

I think it should say "The whole group will face the death penalty."