Does your fire department do background checks? If not, you should consider it. Unfortunately, it’s a cost of doing business these days.
For decades, our department hasn’t done one and we’ve been lucky. I am knocking on wood as I write this.
However we got a wake-up call when a recent unpleasant, but necessary event occurred within my department. It's one we could have avoided if we had just done background checks on new recruits. Fortunately, nothing serious happened, but we had to let two promising new recruits go because of some things we found out.
It was gut wrenching to give them the news and ask for everything they had been issued back, including the t-shirts and license plate toppers, because we didn’t want them representing our department. I felt bad not only for having to do that but for them as well. We could have spared it all with simple background checks.
I am not going into details but I will share the lessons learned.
Our department is a paid-on-call company which means taxpayers spend money to provide the protection we offer. As employers, fire departments have the responsibilities to recruit and retain people of the highest caliber to provide services to the public who need us on the worst days of their lives.
Whether it’s a volunteer or a career firefighter, the individual needs to be of the highest moral character. We have access to people’s homes, possessions and in the case of car crashes and medical emergencies, their very persons.
There’s no room for anyone with questionable character.
Yet, news feeds, including right here on Firehouse.com, are filled with misdeeds of firefighters who behave badly. No one is immune.
Before our wake up call, our department had, for decades, a very simple application process: name, address, fire experience, skills and all the usual stuff.
We even had a spot to check off whether the candidate had ever been convicted of a felony or misdemeanor or had their license suspended for any reason. There was also space for the candidate to explain if they had. We took the applicants at their word and never verified.
Those days are done.
We’re in the process of revising our application and department bylaws to allow us to do background and motor vehicle checks and we’re doing it to protect ourselves and the public we serve.
We’ve been knocked for not doing it sooner, but in a rural department where we pretty much know everyone or have connections to others who do, it seemed like a superfluous waste of time, especially when we need personnel. We could police our own and catch any bad apples before they joined our ranks.
The holes in that screen are too large, we now realize and we need to tighten down a little harder. There are professions with much less responsibilities that ask for way more information than what we require.
You can’t have a personnel going into Joe Q. Public’s home where a bankroll on a night stand suddenly goes missing and the last people in the room were firefighters.
Nor can we have people who have been convicted of serious motor vehicle violations driving 20-ton apparatus at Code 3 speeds.
Think of the liability of both of those incidents. What happens if that apparatus operator wipes out a family? It would be a tragedy of epic proportions on a human level, but step back one ring out from that ripple and think about the legal nightmare that will have wrath on your department.
And Mr. and Mrs. Public are never going to forget the larceny and violation that took place in their home at the very hands they asked to help out in their time of need. It’s a breach of public trust from which a fire department may never recover.
I once had a chief who said he never wanted to be on a witness stand having to offer testimony about something he knew was wrong from the outset.
That chief would often pose hypothetical questions a lawyer would ask in court: “Chief, did you know that Firefighter Smith had been convicted of DWI three times, yet you let him drive that 40,000-pound tanker at 50 miles an hour and he doesn’t even have a CDL?”
A background check would prevent those questions from ever being asked because it’s likely those kind of individuals would never be behind the wheel in the first place. A chief officer should never face those kinds of questions a background check would go a long way to avoid that kind of situation.
Firefighting is not a business, per se, but it has a lot of trappings of a business. Workmen’s compensation, payroll, personnel issues and a myriad of other business-like facets immediately come to mind. We need to remember those factors of employee/employer relationships, even if there’s no paid compensation.
While it’s true, a background check can’t prevent future misdeeds. Even honorable people with unimpeachable moral character fail sometime. But background checks can go a long way to predicting and preventing future issues.
On the flip side, people stepping up to be volunteer firefighters and even paid on call is declining at a rapid pace. We don’t want to set the bar so high with so many restrictions that we turn away qualified good people, or make them less inclined to join out of paranoia over discovering a bad apple in the bushel.
Nor do we want to be so desperate for people we turn a blind eye to questionable background, or don’t check for fear of what we might find.
There’s got to be a balance between what is reasonable, and what is excessive. We toyed with the idea of finger printing our firefighters, but we decided against it on the grounds that many may object to that kind of requirement.
So, we’ve decided date of birth, driver’s license number and Social Security number is sufficient. Additionally, our application will require a signature notifying applicants that we WILL do a background check. We’re working with our local police department to make that happen.
We may have been the last fire department in the United States that didn’t do background checks, but my guess is, we’re not.
If your department is one of what seems like a minority that doesn’t do background checks, get on it and make a change. It’s more than protecting the image of your fire department. It goes to the very core of what we do every day: to protect and serve the public. It’s time to make sure we reinforce with honor part of that creed.
