Morning Lineup – January 28

Friday Morning Lineup

Ever since I’ve been publishing this website, which has been almost four years now, a couple of news topics have been part of the information mix with regularity that I have always found troubling.  One is the frequency of incidents where firefighters, including chief officers, are being arrested for serious crimes.  The other is the surprising number of times that volunteer members are exposed as embezzlers and similar schemers.

You have seen a fairly high number of reports here on Firegeezer of both types of criminal activity, but believe me when I tell you that I have been showing you only a representative sample of what’s going on.  I avoid posting all or most of the misdeeds because it would overwhelm the website and this would turn into a narrowly focused law-and-order publication and that’s not my purpose.  Also, I have to admit that oftentimes it just hurts to pass on so many, many instances of ill-doing within the community where I have spent most of my life.

In all that time, I have naturally seen some of my fellow firefighters charged with a crime.  But in any large group of people you will have the occasional problem and a fire/rescue department is just that, a group of people.  And we will have the same general makeup of mixed personalities.  But our group is different from most in that we have (or are supposed to have) more stringent requirements to be allowed in.  I have grumbled in  the past about the lack of both paid and volunteer FD’s sometimes shirking their duty to perform a background investigation on new applicants.  Many of these arrests could have been avoided if only this basic practice was done.

Another thing that’s even more inexcusable is when a volunteer organization fails to have their financial activities properly audited AND they fail to purchase perfomance bonds on all their department administrative officials.  Many readers’ jaws dropped last week when we found out about a woman (a school principal at that!) who had pilfered over $1 million of ambulance insurance collections from her VFD.  That most likely could have been so easily avoided with a proper annual audit by an outside accounting professional.  And a performance bond would have helped replace much of the missing funds and prevented the ambulance squad from shutting down.

If I was to try and post every crime that fire/ems people have committed, then just today alone I would have to tell you about:

• a Massachusetts call firefighter who was arrested yesterday and charged with stealing money and equipment from his firehouse and using his position to extort money from various citizens and business in his district. ( STORY HERE.)
• a Washington State firefighter who died after hanging himself in his jail cell where he was being held after he was charged with some child sex crimes ( HERE.)
• a Houston firefighter has reached a deal with prosecuters that will allow her to avoid jail time for shoplifting (HERE).
• a volunteer firefighter in Illinois peaded guilty to the production and possession of child pornography yesterday (HERE).
• a firefighter in England was arrested for performing perverted sex acts on a child (HERE).
• three Alabama firefighters arrested on arson charges in a case that may go back as far as five years (HERE).
• the head of a Florida county’s emergency management agency has been arrested twice in ten days on multiple charges of stealing tens of thousands of dollars from both the EMA and the county ambulance service (HERE).

And that’s just a partial list of reports for today alone.  I don’t have time right now to seek out and make a complete listing of similar crimes, but I am continually amazed at how widespread this kind of activity is.  Just look at the huge amount of taxpayers’ money that is taken not only from the direct loss of funds, but also the cost of investigating and prosecuting the cruds.

It’s time to get this equipment checked out now, so I’ll pause and finish my thoughts on this topic tomorrow.  Right now my thoughts are turning to getting some more coffee going.  So let’s all get started and then we’ll meet back in the day room later.

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