ETHICS AND WORK IN EMERGENCIES 217Other emergency services
I have been arguing that the new terrorism duties of the UK fire service sig-
nificantly strengthen the fire service’s claims to be given exceptional treatment
in pay negotiations. Not only are the new duties likely to be onerous when
discharged; exercising for them and devising plans for protecting the public
will be substantially new and possibly dangerous tasks as well.
Why, if at all, is it any different for the other services involved in emergency
work? Won’t the police and ambulance service and, for that matter, the army,
have to rethink their roles and rise to a new challenge posed by terrorism?
When their jobs become dangerous in the new terrorist climate, won’t they
be dangerous for the same reasons as firefighters’ work will be dangerous?
Yes and no. Here it is important not to lump together different services
involved in emergency work, or their different current circumstances. Police
services seem to me to be emergency services incidentally, and other kinds
of service first of all. In the UK, for example, only 5 per cent of officers at
any one time are available for front-line work, including emergencies, the rest
being involved in such activities as training, administrative work, and court
appearances (http://www.polfed.org/). This is not to say that non-front-line
work is a distraction from the real business of the police. Administrative work
may be, but courtroom appearances definitely are not. A main function of the
police service in the UK and elsewhere is to collect and present evidence for
the prosecution of criminal offences. Although this work takes police offthe
streets, it does not take police away from legitimate police work. The fact that
the public in the UK wishes that the police were more visible on the streets
and deterring crime and disorder does not mean that invisible police work is
any less police work. Undercover detection work is not, for example. But, to
return to our main topic, very little of what counts as front-line work in the
police need be emergency work. Front-line work typically amounts to routine
patrolling. This, and the proportion of front-line work to police work as a
whole, is what makes the classification of the police as an emergency service
questionable.
Even if the proportion of UK police time spent on proper emergency
work were much higher than it actually is, the circumstances of the police
service are not comparable to those of the fire service. Numbers in police
services have been rising in many countries and are due to go on increasing.
Between 1998 and 2000 there was a growth of 70,000 or about 9 per cent in
the police and detective force of the USA, with a predicted further growth
of 21 per cent for the period 2000 to 2010 (Occupational Outlook Quar-
terly2002). This compares to a predicted growth in firefighter numbers of
only 9 per cent, this increase in turn being largely accounted for by vol-
unteer firefighters going into full-time employment (Occupational Outlook