Microcast: What’s Missing from the Public Safety Conversation – My Two Cents.

What’s missing from the Public Safety Conversation – My Two Cents:

Welcome to the guns and yoga podcast.  My name is Wendy Hummell.  Today’s microcast is inspired by my belief that organizational wellness should be at the forefront of the public safety.

Lately I have been paying attention to what many of our local politicians in Wichita KS are saying on the topic of public safety, in particular the conversation surrounding staffing shortages.  It is a priority topic this campaign season and I have heard higher pay, recruiting, and retention mentioned quite a bit.

Competing for qualified applicants is a trend we see across the nation, and it’s no different for us in Kansas.  While you will never hear me argue that cops, firefighters, detention deputies, paramedics or dispatchers shouldn’t get a raise, this is just one component of a multifaceted problem. 

The landscape for public safety has changed over the past several years.  Covid and rallying cries for police reform and defunding the police in response to police shootings and high-profile cases such as George Floyd in May 2020 impacted law enforcement across the nation. 

On January 6, 2021, protestors stormed the Capitol and many of the officers working that day were injured; some lost their lives.  One of the officers who died by suicide was Jeff Smith, a DC Metro Police Officer, the first suicide death to be classified as a LODD and eligible for benefits from the PSOB or Public Safety Officers Benefits Program.  Legislation to include suicides was enacted in August 2022.   We have data that tells us suicide is the leading cause of death amongst law enforcement.  We have only begun to track this data in the past decade, so the numbers are likely higher than we know not just for cops, but other public safety professions as well.

My call to action is for community leaders and politicians to recognize that we must invest in those doing the work.  While we need to recruit, we absolutely must focus on not just retaining those workers we have, but going a step further and supporting their mental, emotional, and physical health so they want to stay and thrive in all areas of their life. 

A lofty goal I know, but I have seen too many of my friends and co-workers suffer due to stigma, lack of agency support, or lack of knowledge and limited access to resources. 

In a report done by Lexipol, “Stressed & Short-Staffed: Challenges Facing First Responders and the Impact on Community Safety” in which they surveyed 9,400 police, fire, and EMS workers the results were not suprising to those of us in the trenches, but we need to make sure this gets in front of our community leaders as well:

Here is some of the data from the report and I’ll include the links below:

• 94% of firefighters have experienced staffing challenges in the past year
• 87% of police officers work in departments that are not fully staffed based on authorized staffing numbers
• 86% of EMS professionals say their departments have experienced staffing challenges in the past three years
• 45% of police officers report that their time-off requests are being denied more often
• 67% of firefighters and 51% of EMS professionals said their stress level is negatively impacting other aspects of their health
• 68% of police officers are more concerned about on-duty safety due to short staffing
• 50% of police officers and 54% of EMS professionals plan to leave their jobs in the next 5 years

In order to get off the hamster wheel of low staffing, mandatory overtime, chronic stress, poor lifestyle habits which leads to diminished efficiency and quality of services, we need to do better.  We need full scale organizational wellness programming.  Of course we need to recruit and pay a competitive wage, but keeping people healthy and cared for so they want to stay until retirement must be considered as well.  Often the first responder culture is referred to as “toxic” and having “low morale”.  I’ve used these terms myself and retired from a career I loved sooner than I planned because of it, but we must do better.

LINKS:

Police1.com - Lexipol survey uncovers alarming staffing shortages and stress levels reported by first responders

Police1.com - Broken, dysfunctional and horrible: Kansas officers describe culture in report

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