I’m using the un-PC -man terms because I think this is something which is probably more relevant to the males; it’s hard to imagine their female colleagues behaving in quite this way.
In The Departed, there’s a scene where Matt Damon, along with other Massachusetts state police cadets, is playing football against the fire department. At the end, they jeer and deride the firemen, calling them pussies and faggots, and telling them to go rescue kittens out of trees.
Is there really this kind of nastiness going on between fire and police departments? I always thought they generally got along pretty well and interdepartmental friendships were common. Or is it perhaps a Boston thing?
I put this in IMHO, because I suppose I am looking for opinions, or personal experiences. I know we have several police officers here; there must be firefighters too though I don’t recall anyone mentioning it.
In my experience, tension comes over debates of who’s in charge. There’s more than a few situations where this isn’t exactly clear. Also, the police think the firefighters get paid a lot of money to mostly sit in recliners and the firefighters don’t like it when the cops point that out.
Seriously, though, a lot of it comes from the fact that fire calls are down and a lot of fire departments are responding to more types of calls than they were in the past. In some cases, this leads to a lot of people standing around and getting in the way. For example, one of the fire departments that we work with decided that they were going to start responding on mental health holds with the ambulance and the police. In the past, we’d usually have 1 ambulance and 2 police officers on the call. This worked out pretty well, you minimized the amount of people around- 1 EMT or medic and 1 officer with the patient, 2 more for backup. Typically what needs to be done on these scenes is talk to the patient and have the police fill out their paperwork. Add in an engine crew, and now you’ve got 4 guys who are going to stand around, do nothing, and often get snippy if you cancel them. You double the number of people for no benefit and it raises the tension level of the patient for no good reason. A lot of cops I know complain that the fire department doesn’t respect their crime scenes either.
So it’s not really outright hostility, more just resentment at having a bunch more people show up and get in the way. I feel the same way on some of my medical calls, as well.
Socially, I’ve always gotten along with the PD. The only times we’ve had disagreements is when (usually a rookie officer) decides he’s gonna park the cruiser right where I want to park the engine or ladder, and on the PA turnpike, when troopers don’t want to close lanes or shut down traffic. I’m not a big fan of having traffic whizzing by me less than 10 feet away while the driver is gawking at what we’re attempting to accomplish. People become statistics, that way.
