“Five to one baby, one in five. No one here gets out alive.”
‘Five to One’ by Jim Morrison (Joel Brodsky photo)
One of our best recruitment tools might be to stop banging on about our deaths
By Bill Carey
1 January 2024
First and foremost, this article is not a slight at our national fire service organizations that are working to improve our managing of risk, providing means to operate as safely as local conditions allow, and encouraging us to become better aware of our health, fitness and wellness.
Neither is this a call to dismiss the fatality data information presented here and elsewhere.
Instead, this a call for us to examine the messages, the optics, that we put out online that boast – or crow if you will – about how we die in so many ways: year after year, after year.
One of my coworkers and friends, Tiger Schmittendorf, is well known for his work in recruitment and retention. As an editorial board member, contributor and presenter, Tiger’s work is successful in helping fire departments turn their recruitment efforts around. When helping struggling departments have that important ‘come to Jesus’ conversation with Tiger, one of his best statements about a common observation is, “No one wants to join the Titanic fire department.”
As a result, his work has been able to help departments recraft their recruitment messages and, in some instances, rebrand themselves. The need for volunteers did not go away, but the passion to gain new firefighters lost in desperation was rechanneled into giving people a place to belong, contribute, and enjoy.
We have to be willfully ignorant to think that our constant sharing, without proper context, information about how we are dying because of job stress, cancer in our PPE, and misunderstood fireground strategy and tactics is not affecting our recruitment efforts. Imagine how younger generations receive information these days. All the various forms of information paint the picture of what to expect. On the periphery are the tragic stories, references, and connotations of how we have one of the deadliest jobs in the world, or ways in which more of us die besides on-duty deaths. Combined with local news on the subject and the misery is not hard to see.
A phrase I use in some presentations to show how poignant this perpetual woe is, is this:
“Welcome to the best job in the world. You might have a long and happy career unless you in that small number who are killed in a collapse or flashover. Instead, you are more likely to die of a heart attack after training or when you get home after a call. But if not, well, you will probably die of cancer a few years after retirement. That is, of course, if you have not killed yourself due to stress beforehand.”
If you knew nothing of the fire service, would you want this job?
As someone who has worked for several years in fire service news, the stories about fire departments struggling to find recruits are easy to find. They are usually hyper-local but paint the same story about struggling to serve with the few members a department has while painting the new generation – improperly – about having a lack of desire for service. There are many good news recruitment stories out there and I prefer to post those when possible as they show departments making progress. Combined with related recruitment content from contributors, the good news stories offer encouragement, lessons learned, and a story contradictory to the common narrative.
That does not mean that the negative stories do not hold any value. However, as a news editor, there is a responsibility (at least in my mind) to be balanced and offer those on the street solutions instead of constant woe. In a recent work meeting I had to give a training presentation on something I had learned related to my job. I chose the media and public perceptions lessons I learned when creating presentations for the Maryland State Firemen’s Association and the Training Days conference.
Communications professor George Gerbner’s research and development of cultivation theory from the 1970’s shows that viewers who are exposed to violence-related content can experience increased fear, anxiety, pessimism and a heightened state of alert in response to perceived threats. This is because media (namely television) consumed by viewers has the power to directly influence and inform their attitudes, beliefs and opinions about the world. This is likely magnified when the viewer’s experience is minimal.
This effect has been repeated in recent years, again with violent and crime, and with new subjects such as COVID-19 and politics. Referred to as “mean world syndrome,” the constant perpetuation and consumption of negative news, especially on social media, leads readers to have a negative cognitive bias even when data shows evidence to the contrary.
Related: How Did We Become Scared of the Roof? The Visual
The perpetuation of a fatalistic end to service as a firefighter grows out of the continual publicity of ways we meet our demise. You might reason that this publicity is rational and belongs in our daily communication. However, besides the effect on recruitment, there is an additional consequence to be aware of.
As a culture, we naturally feed off each other’s messages and identify with issues that reaffirm our idealizations (regardless of how true they may or may not be). Constantly sorrowful narratives that are, as mentioned earlier easily accepted and believed, also give way to doomscrolling as they appear without end in our online groups and contribute to burnout and compassion fatigue.
Avoiding the terrible realities of our job is not a productive way to deal with them. Likewise, constantly wearing them in a heart on your sleeve manner to draw attention to your notoriety or promote our service above another is also not productive. Be honest and realistic about our hazards without embellishing them.
They are difficult enough on their own without us hyping them.
Data Not Drama 