In Part 4 of our series on up-and-coming innovative city, Lancaster, PA., Police Chief John Bey and Fire Chief Scott Little share how they are working collaboratively to rebuild trust and better serve their residents.
Today, we continue our series with innovative city, Lancaster, Pennsylvania. In this episode, I chat with Lancaster's police chief and fire chief about how all departments are coming together around the central goal of engaging the community and taking a more human-centered approach to city leadership.
More info:
Featured government: Lancaster, PA
Episode guests:
John Bey, Police Chief
Scott Little, Fire Cheif
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Lindsay: (00:05)
Welcome to the Govlaunch podcast. Govlaunch is the Wiki for local government innovation and on this podcast, we're sharing the stories of local government innovators and their efforts to build smarter governments. I'm Lindsay Pica-Alfano, co-founder of Govlaunch and your host.
Today, we continue our series on up and coming innovative city, Lancaster, Pennsylvania. In this episode, I chat with Lancaster's police chief and fire chief about how all departments are coming together around the central goal of engaging the community and taking a more human centered approach to city leadership. So I'll turn to Chief Bey and Chief Little to share more of their work, to inspire local governments everywhere to put their community first and work better across silos.
Lindsay: (00:51)
Thank you both for being here. Can you each quickly introduce yourself and share a bit about your role? John, I'll start with you.
John Bey: (00:58)
Hi, thanks for having me. My name is John Bey and I am the chief of police for the bureau of Lancaster city police department.
Scott Little: (01:07)
Hi, I'm Scott Little. I'm the fire chief here for the city of Lancaster bureau of fire. Been on staff for a little over three and a half years and responsible for all aspects of providing professional fire and rescue services to our 60,000 residents or 40,000 visitors each day.
Lindsay: (01:26)
Great, well with government departments being traditionally very siloed, I'm curious about the relationship between each of your departments. Would love to begin with a high level view of what your departments are trying to achieve collectively.
John Bey: (01:39)
If you want to look at a 50,000 foot perspective of what we do here in Lancaster, the mayor has established a executive leadership team and that team is composed of the directors or chiefs from the various departments. So collectively we come together to improve the quality of life for our citizens. And we meet regularly to help the mayor in her management of the city. Since I started here in Lancaster, I've met with directors of other agencies like for instance, the warden of the county prison, the county sheriff, the director of probation and parole, I've met with those individuals. And as well as the DA, we've sat down and we've talked about ways that we can collaborate and support one another to have cross-pollinization of practices and training again, with the thought in mind, to improve the quality of life for our residents. And so once I've had that initial meeting with that director or that chief, I then set up a meeting with my command staff and their command staff to, to sit down and make sure that we're all on the same sheet of music.
Lindsay: (02:55)
And Scott what would you add?
Scott Little: (02:58)
So again, it starts with the mayor and our eight members, with the mayor on the executive leadership team. And part of that is for all of us to find ways to break down decade old silos that were built for the betterment of all of our neighborhoods and really improving that mindset that we're going to improve our city, our neighborhoods block by block. And we all have embraced that, and we all want our, you know, high performing high energy commitment of our teams are finding creative ways to do that. So like with the police, how we have really breaking down some, some of those decade old silos that was kind of that police vs. fire mentality, Chief Bey and myself, we've been able to build our teams and our mid-level managers and our supervisors to really see the big picture of a city and not by just our public safety entities.
Scott: (04:07)
So now we're involved in a lot of disaster preparedness planning together, the unified incident command system we're implementing together, things that should have always been done that may not have. And being both that we both are from the outside, not from Lancaster, we're able to share that bigger picture. So I think that's really helped to improve our public safety drive for our community as a city as a whole. And then it's just all that smaller key pieces that we need to do. So that outreach. We both have commitment to the outreach in our neighborhoods, block parties, working together on national night out, doing all the small things that we hear one day we'll pay off.
Lindsay: (04:50)
And probably already paying off. From my conversations with Danene, you guys have been working on quite a few things together, not just the block by block larger initiative, but how everything ties back into building stronger neighborhoods. And that starts with building trust with the community. And so much of that is departments like fire and police getting on the same page and really reaching out to the community and being part of the community with the same message. So that's a great point you made about getting away from fire versus police and working more collaboratively together. Can you elaborate, you touched on a few projects, you all are working on, but can you elaborate on a project or two you've been involved with in line with these collective goals?
Scott Little: (05:35)
Yeah. So I can start with what we have done as a broad perspective of the city. When we talk about, you know, our neighborhoods and block by block and these key performance indicators, using building blocks is a software tool, which is an open data platform for everyone in our community, to be able to go to that website, see how their neighborhood is really scoring using these key performance indicators, which is critical in the line of work we're doing is public service. No matter if it's our housing director, a police Lieutenant, or a battalion chief in the fire bureau, we all have this at our fingertips, this access to know what we need to be working on. So we've come together across department and bureau lines and do walking audits. And we're looking in our block by block again, that's key for us because as we build the blocks stronger than that whole neighborhood, and it just blossomed from there.
Scott Little: (06:35)
So we're really right now looking at what was pre COVID. We had three really high hazard neighborhoods that we knew we need to focus on. We're doing walking audit. So all the department directors are out walking that block together, identifying the needs and which each department and bureau, how you a part in fixing that block and what can we do with our staff to make sure it's improved. So for fire in these walking audits, we're looking at the condition of the buildings we're looking at. Do we have reports in any violations of not having a working smoke alarms? And if so, then we go back with smoke alarms for free through our program that we offer and be able to install them. We also have housing looking at key issues. We have our waste and recycling officer out looking to see if there's places to put public trash receptacles on it, uh, on the corner of the street or in the middle of the block to help with trash pickup. So we're doing all these different things. And the good thing is we're bringing every department together to do this because we need the whole team concept while we do it.
Scott Little: (07:47)
I think it also goes back to, you know, for myself working in multiple levels of government and never once was on a team like we have here in the site where no one cares about who's getting the credit, as long as the work's getting done, right. We're improving our neighborhoods and our residents. That's what matters the most.
Lindsay: (08:09)
And that's fantastic. And that's why we wanted to bring Lancaster on. And each of you from your teams. This is a universal challenge in local government, really any government entity, these very siloed departments that have hard time talking with each other. And now that we're moving toward a more data driven world when there's a lot of tools that help us get there. I know you mentioned building blocks, which is provided by Tolemi. We have no choice, but to also work together as a team, right, it's technology can only get you so far. And the work that you all have done in Lancaster in a relatively short amount of time is really impressive. Looking for practical takeaways for others that are trying to break down these departments silos. Can you talk about the communication style across your departments? How are you handling these coordinated efforts on projects?
John Bey: (09:00)
Well, I think our communication style is varied. Again, as a executive leadership team, we get together once a week for a couple of hours every Monday, and, uh, and talk about issues that are inherent to each department and how we can assist each other. We share good news, we share above the line news, and then we ask each other for who needs help with what issue. And we talk about those issues. Again, just kind of fall back on what Scott said and what you mentioned Lindsay about being data-driven, you know, data, data provides insight. And so whenever we're able to collect, collate and share data, that provides insight into each other's respective, uh, bureaus and agencies, and, and able to give us the ability to talk about it and to if we can assist each other.
John Bey: (09:52)
We're working to improve our communication here in the bureau from not just top down, but from bottom up and horizontally. And so we use all the traditional methods, you know, meetings and email, and we have monitors strategically placed throughout the bureau to run messaging for our patrol officers to see and to digest. Additionally, you know, going to a line up in the morning and in the evenings before patrols go out to share data and information, and that's key to that healthy, robust communication process.
Scott Little: (10:29)
And I think to go along that line, we're open and honest and transparent with all of our process. We're seeing that in a police bureau, um, where they have now put all their policies online, that any resident can refer them right to the police website and say, Here's our policy of how we conduct day-to-day business. Fire, we're the same way we're open about everything we have to offer to our residents, because we are the public safety personnel for the city as taxpayers. They deserve to really have that open book into how we're spending taxpayer dollars. Between the two bureaus we're over $38 million alone in just public safety costs here in the city of Lancaster for police and fire 24 7 around the clock coverage.
Scott Little: (11:20)
So it's important we involve our community and our partners, and we've been doing what I believe has been a really good job also has paid dividends in how our community then supports us in a time of need for our members just when we're out in the public, doing things in the interaction and how we have changed, how, um, the conversation would go, because they know where they can go to find the resources and really for us to help guide them and having to understand, because it's important, we're educating the public on what it is we do because the old mindset for fire rescue services was, oh, you're one of those firefighters that just sits in the kitchen all day, plays video games and waits for a fire to come. When in reality, we're out in the streets, we're pre-planning, or our route of travel planning, uh, the building construction, we're doing inspections and we're at community events and just, there's a whole dynamic level of the all hazard approach that has become public safety that we've got to educate the community on.
John Bey: (12:27)
Yeah. And just to add to that, too. In addition to our policies that we post, we also post on a quarterly basis, our use of force statistics on our website and our arrests and things of that nature and all those, all that data that lends itself to enforcement and interaction with our community. We're in the process of hiring a media specialist, if you will, for, to embed in our office of community engagement, to establish a dashboard, and to also, uh, work our social media to let our community know and everybody, for that matter, you know, all the wonderful things that this police department does above and beyond enforcement. Our community engagement is huge, our partnership with our community, that's a big part of what we do on a daily basis. So it's important for that information to be shared, and that people know that it is truly a partnership between the police department and our community.
Lindsay: (13:30)
Speaking of all of the positive work that you're doing in the community, a lot of what you do is beyond what we typically think of as the role of fire and police. Specifically around these more human centered, more broad community service pieces. How has your staff responded to this change to be more involved in community service? And how are your neighborhoods responding?
John Bey: (13:52)
Well for the police, coming in off the heels of the protests last year, there were some walls that were up, but following the mayor's strategic goals for community engagement, and to rebuild trust and to establish a partnership between the community and the police departments, you know, sticking to that strategy has paid off of. One of the first things I did was to re-institute our bike patrols. And there was a little hesitancy from our officers with regard to, you know, you're essentially vulnerable on that bike and you're going into what they perceive as a somewhat hostile environment coming off of what happened last year.
John Bey: (14:36)
But it has taken off. They love being out on a bike. We're going to grow that program here in the near future to purchase more bikes and to train more officers out on bikes. And to that end, our community has been asking for the bike patrols to return for quite a while, from what I understand. And so they've received our bike patrols, very warmly with open arms. They're very enthusiastic about it, and it’s paying off dividends. So that's just one of the investments in our community that we're making to establish that partnership and to build that safety net between the police department and our community.
Scott Little: (15:20)
I think Lindsay for fire, as we shift culture, as we shift a complete attitude towards public safety and respecting others and taking care of our city. It's important that the buy-in happens with all of our staff in public safety, and getting that foundation that you treat everyone right and respectful. And we have that all-in work ethic individually, and then having that positive attitude. So just some of those initiatives, the simple things we start with is opening your fire station doors, right? So where the apparatus is housed, get those doors open, let the public know you're here and get that engagement going in neighborhoods that are stations are in, which happens.
Scott Little: (16:06)
And we get, uh, members of the community saying, Hey, can I come right along for a couple of hours? And we do things like that. And then it just getting out and about where we're out driving in our communities, the firefighters would get off the fire trucks. They'll walk the neighborhoods there. We're just out and about in the community all day long. Because the more our community sees our members, the more, they might see them at the grocery store. It's just that whole building and relationship in positive ways pays off. We do a 9/11 stair climb at our local minor league baseball stadium here last year, we had members of our community that aren't firefighters, but they wore our gear and went along and climbed with us. And now we have more people that want to do it this year. Uh, so it's important we continue to build and build relationships that matter and improve the overall welcoming city that Lancaster is.
Lindsay: (17:03)
Well, you touched on this a little bit, Scott, and your answer with the community, getting involved in the 9/11 stair climb, but how do you measure your success or put otherwise, how do you know what you're trying to accomplish is really working?
Scott Little: (17:17)
Well for us. There's a couple of ways obviously we publicly put out, uh, annual reports on the bureau and the things we're doing. We have a, uh, city service objective that say 90% of the time, we want to have minimum 15 firefighters arriving, uh, within nine minutes of every call. So we put that type of thing out there. We put out how much training time is our workforce been doing in that year? What is their turnouts on it? You know, it's not for us about when the call comes in. It's not how fast the fire trucks driving to get there, because they don't really make up any time in research. Where they make up the time as a turnout time. That's when you're activated for the incident and the time it takes you to get on your fire truck before it actually moves is what's critical.
Scott Little: (18:07)
So we post that type of information across our shifts to the public to say, here's what we're doing. And here's our numbers. Which also helps when we get into the neighborhood programs where we go door to door after fires in neighborhoods, we go door to door around that block and knock on the door and he has to be able to work in smoke alarm. We had a fatal fire in December. The following day, we were out with the mayor canvassing that neighborhood, and we installed 40 more smoke alarms that one day on just that block, that the family's not smoke alarm. So that's a 14 year old program now that in 14 years has had over 4,000 smoke alarms installed within properties in Lancaster. So it's just, it's important we're building those relationships. Um, and we have a very supportive, uh, fire foundation, which is a local, uh, business owners sit on our board and help raise funds for our fire department and our personnel and equipment needs that maybe the general budget can't afford, uh, depending on the year, uh, they still step up and help raise money, uh, to get our personnel equipment that they might need.
John Bey: (19:21)
So for a police department, our measurement is not so much quantitative as it is qualitative. And again kind of going back to what happened over the past couple of years, nationally in terms of protests, you get a feel for your community and its feelings toward the police department. And I think here in Lancaster, given the things that we've put into place and put into action in terms of our community engagement and our very intentional, deliberate initiatives to rebuild trust it's paying off. And I think qualitatively, it feels different. I had an event at a local church on Sunday and about 10 officers showed up at the church and they were very well received. And as I walk around the city the beeping of the horn, the waving, the hey chief, the positive affirming interaction that I see in the letters that I get from people about the professionalism of our officers, I think all speaks to that qualitative feedback that we need to know that we're doing things the right way and that we're on the right course.
Lindsay: (20:37)
That's great. Our goal with these podcasts and on Govlaunch is to leave local governments with actionable insights, things that can immediately put into action in their own government, regardless of size. So what's some actionable advice you would each share relating to your work?
John Bey: (20:53)
Well, I think an actionable item is, uh, to be very intentional about non-enforcement engagement with your community from a police perspective,going back to old school police officers walking the beat, stopping into corner stores, removing themselves from that, what I call mobile barrier, which is their patrol car and just getting out, interacting with, with folks and letting them meet and get to know that person inside the uniform, uh, that that person is, uh, a father or mother or brother, a sister, a wife, a husband, you know, just normal people who have a job to do and develop that authentic organic relationship with your communities. I's key to helping you with investigations as you move forward. Uh, but it's also key to just improving the quality of life for your community. So that's low hanging fruit. That's something that's very easy to do, but police officers in our profession have to just get past that us versus them mentality and just really put themselves out there to be authentic and organic with their communities and get to know them.
Scott Little: (22:07)
I think for us, it's the service programming that matters, being intentional about what is it our community needs. So specifically looking at the bureau of fire is okay, what's the current level of quick response for EMS are we able to provide? Because we are a non transport agency. So that's where we looked at. Okay. We have X amount of members that are trained to the EMT level, what could they be doing to help improve our community? Uh, so we took that approach three years ago and started running additional medical responses in our neighborhoods because it came back to, if we have highly trained on duty staff and three houses down from the fire station, we have a grandmother who's having a medical emergency. Why aren't we going to help while that EMS unit is coming from 10, 15 minutes away? We can get there and start providing some type of level of care.
Scott Little: (23:07)
So that was a very intentional program that we started and has paid huge dividends on life safety in the city. It's also about the networking internal external, and that goes in hand in hand with that breaking down the silos is the more you build relationships and network with people, you can immediately have responses and interactions and you can get more work done for our community when they call and need assistance. And then again it goes back to doing all the right things, um, that you and your team can do, building on that for the community, and making where we live and work,the best place possible for the residents that we're serving.
Lindsay: (23:57)
That's great. And I think what you all demonstrated today and really what this whole series is demonstrating is the importance of strong leadership and having folks like you leading the charge and rallying teams around you to help support these community centric messages. I really look forward to chatting next week with the Director of Public works, and again with mayor Danene Sorace to wrap up this series on Lancaster and your vision for the future. So thank you both chief Bey and chief Little for being here and sharing your advice with the larger community of local governments looking to innovate.
John: (24:31)
You're welcome. Thank you for having me.
Lindsay: (24:35)
I'm Lindsay Pica-Alfano and this podcast was produced by Govlaunch, the Wiki for local government innovation. You can subscribe to hear more stories like this, wherever you get your podcasts. If you're a local government innovator, we hope you'll help us on our mission to build the largest free resource for local governments globally. You can join to search and contribute to the wiki at govlaunch.com. Thanks for tuning in. We hope to see you next time on the Govlaunch podcast.