We welcome Eric Lamar to the Firegeezer pages.

Save Lives Not Take Them

 On October 10, 2010, FDNY firefighter Pat Quagliariello’s personal SUV struck and killed a pedestrian crossing a street in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn and then left the scene. The accident happened very near Engine 330/Ladder 172, his duty station.

According to news accounts, Quagliariello has admitted that his vehicle was involved. Craig Esswein, an Assistant District Attorney, said that Quagliariello fled the scene and left the victim “to die.” He was recently arrested and charged with criminally negligent homicide and leaving the scene of an accident without reporting it.

Joseph Tacopina, his attorney, has described Quagliariello’s service record as “heroic” and indeed, on the day of the incident, Quagliariello was involved in a fundraiser for a wounded Iraq war veteran. If Quagliariello is found guilty it will raise the question of how people who risk their lives for others can also take a life, and by fleeing the scene, even ignore that it happened.

It will also raise the question of whether or not firefighting, presumed to be about heroic and selfless deeds, can be reduced to a series of acts that are divorced from moral imperatives. After all, firefighting is simply the completion of a series of tasks. Lives and property may be saved but if the acts are carried out with a sufficient degree of moral distance, a potentially heroic deed becomes just a task well done.

Since the incident happened so close to his firehouse, firefighter Quagliariello could conceivably have saved his victim one day and killed him the next, possibly without giving either act much thought. We should be concerned about that.

Engine 330 / Truck 172

For the act of firefighting to be grounded in moral purpose firefighters need to be connected to, and identify with, the community in which they operate. When identity and connection is absent firefighting is reduced to an occasionally dramatic but never-the-less banal public service. Firefighters become estranged from the community they protect.

FDNY has become disconnected on a fundamental level: in most of the City the people who do the job are unlike those in the community and may well be less likely to understand or value the community or their culture. It is much easier to learn respect for those of other cultures when they are present in a peer environment. Non-whites (and women) are effectively blocked from peer relationships in FDNY and everyone suffers for it.

Co-workers share professional similarities. These often serve as the basis for greater awareness that can reach far beyond the workplace to a fuller understanding of other cultures. If everyone on your work team looks, talks and thinks just like you, you are in a limiting, and potentially damaging professional environment. It can be a breeding ground for ignorance, intolerance and potentially reckless disregard.

FDNY firehouses are white male islands floating in an urban sea comprised of a majority population that is neither white nor male. While the City is only about 45% white, FDNY firefighting forces are roughly 90%. In fact, in a city that is 25% Black and 27% Hispanic the ratios for FDNY firefighters are 3.4% and 4.5%, respectively. FDNY firefighting forces are also 99% male. The opportunity for a white male firefighter to establish peer relationships with non-whites (or non-males) is very slim indeed. A Hispanic male is almost as likely to be struck crossing the street as to be hired as an FDNY firefighter.

The situation in New York is many decades old and is based on thinly disguised racist and sexist rationales and policies. It has been condoned or accepted tacitly or implicitly by every Mayor, Fire Commissioner, Chief of Department and many Council Members. They have created a fire department which is wholly unrepresentative of the city it serves and the outcomes may extend far beyond legitimate claims of a lack of equal opportunity. In that sense, there may have been more than two hands on the steering wheel that night. When the moral underpinning of the profession degrades to a low enough level, a point of no return is reached.

Firefighters don’t have to love all citizens but they should have enough respect for them to stop when they run them over.

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Eric’s fire/rescue career includes 22 years with a municipal fire and rescue department, and 12 years with the International Association of Fire Fighters headquarters in Washington, DC.  He retired from both.  Along the way he served in a variety of elected positions with the IAFF at the local and state level.