The Vincent Gray administration is deploying firefighters to street corners to help protect members of the city’s Summer Youth Employment Program on payday. Youths enrolled in the program have routinely been mugged on paydays in summers past. The city has tried different tactics to keep kids working government-sponsored jobs from being targeted, including dropping paychecks for debit cards. But Mayor Gray’s solution is to put firefighters in harm’s way to keep the robberies from happening under his watch, said firefighter representatives.
“[Fire] Chief [Kenneth} Ellerbe simply wants a ‘uniformed presence’ of Fire and EMS representatives to serve as a deterrent to problems on an ongoing basis where the SYEP kids who are assigned to DC FEMS are working,” fire department spokesman Lon Walls told The Washington Examiner in an emailed statement. “In addition, he feels such a presence in various hot spots around the city would aid as a possible deterrent to possible problems.”
Walls said Ellerbe started the initiative on his own.
But emails obtained by The Examiner show the plan is being coordinated from the mayor’s office and is focused on “payday safety.”
“I just want to follow up with you about FEMS providing a presence at [high crime areas] and other focus areas to assist with SYEP payday safety,” a legislative and policy analyst for the deputy mayor for public safety wrote in an email to a fire department official on Tuesday.
The first payday was Wednesday, the emails said.
Fire union chief Ed Smith said he learned about the plan Wednesday morning.
“We’re not trained for these matters,” Smith said. “When we respond to violent crimes that involve medical emergencies, we stage a block away until the police say it’s safe. We never get involved in police matters.”
Smith said it’s not clear to firefighters what having “presence” means.
Police union chief Kris Baumann speculated that the plan was put in place because the police department is short on officers. Baumann added that putting firefighters in police work could harm relationships with the community. “Firefighters and police have very different relationships with people,” Baumann said. “You don’t want the perceptions that come with being a police officer to get mixed up with the image of firefighters.”
Walls said the plan was not a reaction to a shortage of police officers.
