As a memner of my department I have been asked to be part of a committee to duscuss the ramifications of a pandemic on our duties. Does anyone know if this has been addressed before? I have seen many discussions involving health departments and hospitals but very little information on what, if anything police departments can do to prepare for a pandemic. Our group has already met once and we came up with ideas such as calling in officers and having them stay a local motels and not going home, “no need to take any infections home to the wife and kids”, but we really haven’t come up with much other than stock up on N-95 masks and gloves. Could use some help!
Perhaps I don’t understand the question. Has this been addressed before?!? I sure hope so! Your mission in a pandemic will largely depend on your county and state pandemic plans. Let’s hope security is a issue that’s covered there. You may also want to ask the state planners about the role of the military and their interface with local police departments. There are local, county and state police departments everywhere. And there are organizations, guilds, etc. that should be exploring scenarios and developing plans. Perhaps you could tell us more about the kind and size of department we’re talking about? Is your juristiction urban, suburban, or rural?
As in business continuitgy planning, when thinking about ramifications, a graded series of severity conditions should be explored and planned for. If the CFR is high and/or infrastructure begins to break down, law and order issues and demands will rapidly multiply while your staffing is effected much as the rest of the population.
Here’s a good question to ask within the context of your state’s plan: Is your police department considered a “first responder”, and as such are there plans to provide potential protections (masks, anti-virals, or vaccines when available)?
How great to hear that you’re even considering such a monumental but necessary task! Kudos!!
I’m NOT a police-type person at all, but right off the top of my head, do you have a limit to the amount of ammo you can store at your precinct? :-)
Seriously, if you’re considering putting people up at a motel, it’s the same as putting them up in someone else’s home — in the sense that it’s private property and you’ve lost ALL hope of control of the property unless you use your police power to run the place the way you want to because otherwise management would have a say as to what’s stored there, who comes and goes, etc.
If they’re afraid that your people are dealing with sick ‘rowdy’ people, they might not be thrilled that your off-duty folks are congregating at the pool or the ice machines — germs you know, and they might not realize that you’d probably be better trained than anyone about not touching things and spreading germs.
Anyway, you’d need to provide off-site food, probably water & medicines, laundry service etc. as well, and I’m sure you probably have some of that stuff already in your building. Because of the logistics of not only storing all that stuff, but protecting it from the general public & from management/staff of the motel, I’d sure be thinking of a way to prepare for them either on-site in some section of your building (or on top of your building) that is least used or could be converted.
As an alternative, you could make some sort of tent-type provision for them in their own yards at home — maybe that’s unrealistic. At any rate, all I know is that under these conditions if my husband/wife was a policeperson, I’d want to know they were safely tucked inside their own building, even if it were the roof or the basement, and not totally dependent on others, or that they were within eyesight of me at my own house. I’d use walkie talkies or a baby monitor or something to keep in close contact with them if they were in my own yard but that may be getting extreme for your department to handle cost on and not everyone might want to ‘invest’ in something they don’t believe will happen.
Another alternative might be renting RV’s so that a group could maybe stay at home some, travel to work together, being picked up one by one in an RV for their shift, then working together for a day or two if necessary, then being driven back home again, where they could make their own arrangements. That would give you power in numbers (except for the driver when they were alone), a place to store supplies in easy reach, ability to be sent to an area of town to ‘patrol’ and still have supplies & somewhat secure mobile environment, and so on.
Just some first thoughts, I hope you get some really good direct help from others more familiar with your situations. Just remember it isn’t only masks and gloves — you’ll need changes of clothing because it will get contaminated, shoe covers perhaps, (actually full PPE suits would be best) you’ll need food, water, shelter, medicine, fuel, entertainment of the reading sort perhaps in case you all get bored watching the rest of us go crazy :-), you’ll basically need anything as a group, that you’d need as individuals at home. And guns.
Here’s the Public Safety section of the Wiki proper. Feel free to add to it.
How big is your department? Do you have a HAZ-MAT section? Are the area fire departments professional or volunteer? In my area there’s not much difference between the two. Co-ordination between municipal authorities, fire departments and hospitals is strongly advised.
The link provided by Melanie above provides a wealth of practical, useful information. Be smart and read it.
Here are some Pandemic Flu Resources for law enforcement from Seattle. Seattle is probably the most proactive and prepared in city in the country. I suspect their law inforcement have started working on the relevant issues. They would probably be good people to contact.
One of the master preppers in the pan flu prep world is Dylan over at Current Events - Flu Clinic. I believe he has a law enforecement background. You might want to go over there as well and pick his brain.
SP Baker - One thing that needs to be addressed with you entire department is training the officers in personal protection from infection. They will have a very tough and possibly nasty job to do. In the event of a full-up pandemic, they will be coming into contact with well people, sick people, the debris left by sick people, and people in an unknown state of health. they need to understand how to protect themselves in all of these conditions while still doing the job they are there to do.
They will also need to understand that they will need to protect themselves from thier brother officers, as on any given day, it will not be knowable whether they are the next carrier, or completely safe and well. This will probably be a strange new set of behaviors which they will not wish to consider. but they will have to for their sake, their family’s sake and their community’s sake.
SP Baker – at 17:07
I am not in law enforcement but I would like to make a suggestion. I work with water/wastewater systems. Part of that work deals with assisting them with developing Sourcewater Emergency Contingency Plans (not Pandemic, but rather generic). My suggestion is for your group to establish priorities as far as allocation of people and resources. If we have a mild pandemic then it will mostly devolve upon the healthcare systems to deal with the health issues and law enforcement assist when needed. Otherwise, probably business as usual for you. If it is a severe pandemic (high case fatality rate and transmissibility) then the healthcare systems will rapidly be over run. As with the 1918 Spanish Flu field hospitals will likely be established. Law enforcement will likely have responsibilites in those locations. But the top concern, in my opinion, will be providing assistance to ensure continuity of electricity, water and wastewater service. For this reason I would suggest your group meet with the departments/businesses that maintain these services and systems. Become familiar with the locations of their infrastructure and what is essential for them to continue service during a pandemic. If these services are lost, then the healthcare providers will not be able to do their work, the people sheltering at home will not have water to drink,…etc, and in short order the population that you serve will become…shall we say…uncontrollable. (Remember New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.)
In making contingency plans for a pandemic I would develop them with the expectation that your city will be on it’s own for a considerable amount of time. No help from the Federal Government, no help from the State, no help from the County. Hopefully there will be assistance, but develop your plans for the worst case scenario. The Federal Government has said as much, and I would believe them.
On a more mundane note, if a pandemic begins, I would make sure hand sanitizers, latex/nitrile gloves and N95 masks are in every police car and departmental offices. At that time I would prohibit shaking of hands and require at least a 3 foot distance between officers when talking to one another. Of cource hands should be washed frequently. If at all possible, all departmental meetings should be held outdoors. Police cars, radios and computers should not be shared, but if needed, use sanitizing solutions to disinfect. If any member of the department runs a fever or in any way exhibits flu symptoms he/she should be relieved of duty until those symptoms have disappeared.
You may have already thought of most of these things, but I wanted to say them just in case you had not. Your work is and will be very important. Thanks and good luck.
I don’t have answers. Two questions may already have been covered, but just in case.
1. Crowd control. At the grocery the day the news break. How do you keep the calm, with so many places to go to at the same time. How much supplies to stock for horses, canine etc. Perhaps you can’t use horses. Tactics may have to change. If officers don’t wear masks, they are exposed. If they do, and the crowd doesn’t have enough, some may try to rip the masks off (as in Indonesia). May be silly: can riot gear i.e. gas mask be used?
2. Escorting convoys of critical medicine e.g. Tamiflu, and other supplies e.g. chlorine for water treatment plants, fuel for critical services. Manpower may become a problem, as is scheduling and coordination. Fuel supplies - don’t know where you normally refuel, but with no electricity, pumps don’t work.
An outline of issues to consider-
Your department will have to cope with a situation during a pandemic where approximately 25 to 50% of those you interact with at any given time are either ill or infectious. Those who are not careful will end up sick themselves. PPE training will be critical.
Hospitals are likely to be overwhelmed early in a pandemic. Most HCW will be either ill or absent, so medical care of ANY sort will be scarce to non-existant. Medic teams should be trained for the absence of hospital care and abundent supplies of antibiotics and antiviral drugs should be secured NOW.
If major infrastructure utilities are lost(water,power, sewer), then there is a high likelihood of partial or wholesale breakdown of civil order in the larger metropolitan areas. If you are in or near such an area, plan for unrest.
in dealing with panflu you will be dealing with a persistant biohazard; you will need to have a setup whereby returning officers coming off shift will remove all PPE, exterior garments and equipment and pass through a disinfection station to ensure complete disinfection. those who work the station and process the equipment will have to wear full PPE. Protocols for disinfection of weapons and duty gear will have to be established, but NOTHING should be omitted.
The department should consider using nylon or synthetic duty rigs with stainless weapons to reduce the impact of disinfectants, most of which are water based.
Once through the disinfection station (showers etc.) a space for dressing on the “clean side” should be arranged.
Such a setup could be arranged in a 20 x40 conference space. Any company that deals with asbestos hazards has the capability to set up an appropriate disinfection space.
Each officer should have separate accomodations to reduce the possibility of cross infections; they could go to their rooms after dressing and either pick up their disinfected equipment or have it delivered when clean.
Officer families should be relocated to a totally isolated safe facility for the duration of the pandemic and provided with medical care.
Anything short of total commitment to officer safety will render the department ineffective.
Much of this is already available on the Wiki side. Read what’s over there first.
Coming at this from a different direction, officers should be made to understand that HCW must receive preferential treatment. Some years back in the aftermath of a severe blizzard, all roads in my area were closed for any but authorized emergence trafic. A neighbor who is a Respiratory therapist was called to come into a hospital which was running out of workable crew. He attempted to get to the hospital on roads which were actually open and passable by this point, though legally closed. he was intercepted by police officers who were completely disinterested in his status as a critical health care worker, other than to tell him to go home, and it was only his HCW status that kept them from arresting him and taking him into custody for this infraction.
Any of this behavior in the face of a rapidly spreading pandemic, where things will be very confused and chaotic, and officers will be under stress could literally mean the end of health care in your entire community. just one stop like that could begin the toppling of the health care system.
It happened here, too, after the last hurricane, Eccles.
Eccles – at 19:37
Add to officer critical duty check list. Providing safe passage for HCW?
I am beginning to think that wind shield passes need to be made available to save time. There might be areas of quarantine with traffic restrictions and check points.
Sounds like martial law…
Naw, just give out passes like they do to clerics at the hospital. This isn’t hard.
if it’s bad, and if they cannot keep the lights on, then if we are very lucky, it will be martial law. If the thin blue line buckles, we’re screwed.
Bump
Thanks for all the help, I have a lot more to discuss than I did. I really appreciate it, dealing with most city officials all you get is the deer in the head lights look or that’s just a scam, it won’t really happen. Kinda scary and these are the higher officials.
I second LMWatBullRun – at 19:21 A basic understanding of infectious disease isolation technique is critical. Simply handing out masks and gloves will be absolutely worthless. The CDC website has excellent documents covering personal protective equipment and more importantly the proper use of them. As far as housing facilities for patrol staff, remember this is a flu and will explode in crowded group environments.
SP Baker – at 00:30
Please explain to them the more physically fit you are, the higher the risk of a quick death via the cytokine storm. Some of the denial may come from the general sense of invincibility for a professional who is trained to face physically dangerous situations day to day.
Please keep the folks here posted on your progress….anything you can provide may help others just starting out where you were a week ago.
SP Baker: If you go to Google video and type in ‘bird flu’ in the search, you will see many types of conference videos, etc. Some of them are directly about law enforcement issues. Some of it is junk but it’s worth looking at.
Police departments have several challenges to confront in a flu pandemic. Here are just a few:
How much personal protective equipment does the department have, and what type is it? Departments should be planning on having at least enough to last through several weeks of a pandemic wave. Figure on at least two N95 facemasks and four or five pairs of gloves per officer per shift for officers on patrol. Add to that alcohol-based hand sanitizer (at least 60% alcohol) eye protection and liquid splash protection, e.g. Tykek suits. The N95 requirement may be moderated to surgical masks depending on whether the bug that emerges is spread by contact or large droplet, or is truly airborne. I recommend nitrile gloves rather than latex, less chance of allergic reactions.
Where is your personal protective equipment? Does your department have its own cache, or are you relying on someone else? Be absolutely certain of where it is, what it contains, who else is tapping into it, and that it is in good condition. Boxes full of gloves tend to turn turn into bicks of goo if they are left in extreme heat or if they are too old.
Think creatively about how you are going to deal with different levels of absenteeism. Police officers and support staff are afflicted with personal demands just like anyone else. What happens when the schools and day care centers close and your personnels’ kids need to be attended to, or the elderly relative who is living with them? What if a number of staff get sick? What calls for service aren’t going to be answered anymore? Can telephone reporting of minor offenses be implemented? (Face it, most of the minor theft or vandalism calls only get reported for insurance purposes and don’t get any investigative follow-up anyway.) Don’t count on mutual aid, the National Guard, the state police, or men from mars for your back-up. They will be in the same boat as you and are unlikely to have the resources to spare to make of for your lack of planning.
Think about how to safely and humanely subdue and take into custody people who are violent AND may be contagious, without getting yourself infected. There may be some really interesting domestic situations arising from the cabin fever effect of SIP, or having the kids inside for weeks.
Work now to establish your relationships with the medical and public health communities. You may be asked to help with contact tracing and quarantine/isolation issues. Get the pandemic command and control structure nailed down, so when the situation develops, folks aren’t fighting over turf. KNOW the laws and legal mechanisms; procedures and documents that you will need to enforce quarantine and isolation.
Make sure that your public information officers are prepared and ready to integrate into the joint information center structure. A consistent, clear, accurate, and transparent public crisis/risk communications strategy will be critical in defusing panic and civil disorder. Rumor monitoring and response takes on a new importance. Begin now the process of educating staff on infection control, use of PPE and the overall situation relating to pandemic flu as it exists right now. Work on that internal communications strategy - cops are the most cynical people on earth.
Think hard about how you will sustain the force physically, emotionally and spiritually. The crisis may last for weeks or months. Officers and staff may be working 7/12′s, living in the stations or on the road. The mental strain on them and their families will be tremendous.
Think about where your critical infrastructure is and how do you safeguard it? How are you going to support the hospitals and alternate care sites with security, so that their infection control and isolation procedures can be implemented? For those in the U.S. - has your jurisdiction identified its Point Of Dispensing Sites (PODS)? Have you worked out, and better yet exercised how you will operate the PODS? (Remember, you may get 20,000 + per day coming in).
How are you going to handle mass fatalities? Do you conduct a full investigation for every death outside of a clinical setting? Will you continue to do that when you have a couple of hundred (or thousand)?
Remember always - your jurisdiction is ON ITS OWN in this one. There isn’t any cavalry coming over the hill.
Bump, because it is so important.
Oceanside, CA
I am a former big city Copper and currently lead a team dedicatd to assisting public safety agencies with crisis management consulting.
I am encouraged that police and fire department interest in Avian flu planning grows and grows.
Careful on the Street! Best to all. Yoda
Master Yoda is correct.
Don’t forget to check six.
FIRST AND FOREMOST MAKE PERSONAL PREPARATIONS FOR YOUR FAMILY.
If you’re not mentally comfortable that you are safe, you can’t concentrate on the job.
One agency I consult for has designated one of their senior centers as an exclusive Public Safety family shelter, complete with their own security, feeding capacity, and medical clinic. Self contained.
Obtain your own PPE, preferably a half face respirator with P100 filters, and LOTS of additional filters, plus Fluid barrier goggles. Properly fit tested.
MUCH more comfortable and safe® on a patrol shift than paper masks.
Your officers should immediately become part of your department’s respiratory fitness testing program, and have respirators (NOT N95 paper masks) properly OSHA fit tested and assigned.
Training and testing on mask maintenance and decon. for every office is an OSHA requirement.
Department should stock necessary supplies like gloves and mask rebuild kits, decon solutions.
Forget about community policing for the duration, as well as single-officer patrol units. Patrol in strike teams. 2 officers minimum, heavy weapons. DIfficult to do if 50 percent are sick, however dispatch will have to triage calls. 12 on, 12 off, rotating days off with whatever manpower you have available.
Work out paper schedules NOW ahead of time.
Think Less Lethal like Tasers for “hands off” method of arrest for non-compliant and presumed infectious perps.
NO calls for service during a pandemic. Emergency calls only. All other reports can be taken over the phone.
CROSS TRAIN EVERYBODY. NOW.
If your dispatch are civilians then train up officers in dispatching and call taking. Same with records.
PLAN FOR POWER OUTAGES. Does DPW have enough portable stop signs for a week or two extended outage ? Manpower to deploy them. Flashlight batteries ? Radio batteries and a means to charge them ?
Plan for communication disruptions. Have a 3rd fallback.
And a couple of thousand other things I can think of off the top of my head.
EWhat an excellent thread topic-thank you!
I’m on an all-volunteer local board of health for my township-about 36000 people. My blood pressure goes up when I think about our first responders and panflu. My son in law is also a cop in a nearby township.
What worries me is this-while we are planning, IMHO this fall/winter is very very potent for the start of a panflu. Nothing scientifically based mind you, just an overwhelmingly strong gut feeling. the first responders (police, fire, EMT) MUST, at all costs, be as prepared to face this threat as possible. The knowledge and skill sets contained by these folks is critical to survival of thousands, and first and foremost to themselves and their loved ones.
I am going to monitor this thread closely-I’m looking for good, specific educational info and peronsal SIP’ing info for them. I liked the King County info ,and have already emailed them with my questions.
Thank You so much!!!
There is so much great advice here. I may duplicate something.
The entire department including support staff and their families should get seasonal flu shots. Those will not prevent H5N1 but will go a long way toward keeping all of you healthy so that you can do your jobs and possibly prevent bringing the normal seasonal flu from home to work.
What about the department purchasing or renting home near the station for use as a barracks when the need arises? Or perhaps a mobile home that could be placed in the department parking lot or a nearby lot would work. They could always be sold after the crisis passes or used for other purposes to recoup some of the costs. The advantage to this over renting a hotel is the officers could cook their own meals (and do their own laundry) much in the way fire crews do, with a home like setting. The department would also have much better control over the security as well.
Where’s the money for all these great ideas going to come from?
I’m sure police departments are already strapped. Are they getting grants from the county, state or federal governments to prepare for a pandemic?
This thread sounds a lot like reading the (very realistic) thread “Are Hospitals Prepared”. SP Baker, I don’t know if you have had the time to look at that thread, but you might wish to. I’m guessing what you are going through is a lot like what health care workers are going through — trying to prepare for something that may (or may not) happen (soon), with money from a budget that you very likely do not have, needing approval from higher-ups who likely won’t give it until things look more certain.
Feel like quitting yet? I say that with total kindness and respect and sympathy. What an incredibly difficult job. And — no pressure, health care workers and police — but, we’re all counting on you! What can we do? What community support do you need? That’s what I want to know.
Bird Guano – at 00:27
I maybe wrong here, but to shelter a number of nonrelated people together ie families of police-during a panflu seem very risky to me. All it would take is one mistake-one infected person to sneak in and give his/her spouse a kiss; check on their kids and boom! it could take off thru them all.
just a thought.
How are things going with police departments;
personal/family preparedness, brainstorming with the essential workers and volunteers in your community how to keep essential services running, anything? Had all your shots?
What community support do you need? (Telling the public clearly to stock up now, may cause less problems for you later. And once they are stocked up, some may help their police departments out, too.)
keeping the topic in view for SP Baker and all police, and their families and communities
Goal # 1 for every professional responder:
Do NOT become a victim!
The means to this goal should be basic infection control education and adequate PPE.
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