"D/FW policy change on cross-training concerns union"

Tuesday, August 17, 2004
 
D/FW policy change concerns union
Airport says separating police, fire functions will help security
efforts
By MICHAEL GRABELL
The Dallas (TX) Morning News


The union representing police officers and firefighters at Dallas/Fort
Worth International Airport says the airport's decision to stop
cross-training new recruits will hurt the department's ability to
respond to terrorism warnings. 

But airport officials say that separating the police and fire functions
will only strengthen their homeland security efforts and that the
disagreement was mainly over whether firefighters would be able to
retain certification for off-duty jobs. 

For 30 years, D/FW certified its officers as both police officers and
firefighters. But the airport changed the policy last year to recognize
the new role of police officers after 9-11, make it easier to recruit
and align policy with the day-to-day operations. 

"Police officers 99.9 percent of their time are performing police
functions, and the same held true on the fire side," said Alvy Dodson,
vice president for public safety. 

But off-duty officers and firefighters have been called upon during
orange-level homeland security alerts to inspect vehicles coming into
the airport, said Dale Clark, president of the D/FW Airport Public
Safety Officers Association. 

Firefighters work 24-hour shifts with 48 hours off, leaving about 100
firefighters available to act as police officers at any time, he said. 

"If a catastrophic event happens, they can use the police officers who
are off duty and the firefighters who are off duty because they have
both certifications," Mr. Clark said. "That gives them a large pool of
police officers to pull from." 

Airport officials recently decided to allow current public safety
officers to retain their certifications so they can work extra jobs.
Off-duty employees often work security at nearby hotels and aviation
businesses. 

But new recruits will be trained only as police officers and
firefighters. D/FW is in the process of hiring 19 new police officers
and one fire prevention specialist. 

Cross-training police and firefighters is generally reserved for small
municipalities, such as Southlake and Watauga, with only a handful of
public safety workers. The two busiest U.S. airports, Chicago's O'Hare
International and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International, do not
cross-train police and firefighters. 

Len Limmer, the architect of the cross-training model at D/FW, said it
initially made sense to have employees who could do both jobs, given the
limited resources and the potential for an airplane crash. 

"I quickly came to the conclusion that the airport could not afford to
staff a separate police, fire and EMS department in order to have the
manpower to handle a major commercial crash with perhaps several hundred
casualties," said Mr. Limmer, the airport's first public safety
director. 

Criminal justice experts agreed with the airport's decision to curtail
cross-training. Policing has become much more specialized with homeland
security efforts, making the "jack of all trades" philosophy less
feasible, said Phillip Lyons, director of the Texas Regional Community
Policing Institute. 

He added that firefighters who don't usually act as police officers
might not be of much help in a terrorist situation if they don't keep up
with the latest intelligence. 

Robert Taylor, criminal justice chairman at the University of North
Texas, agreed. 

"I think they may have come to a point now with the changes in our
world, particularly with the focus of preventing terrorism, that may be
not what we need," he said. "Maybe what we need now is to focus our
resources on specialty areas." 


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