MANUFACTURED EMERGENCIES

By: Chief Scott Hughes (ret.)

The recent lawsuit filed following the death of 19-year-old Amir Jordan in Cincinnati caught my attention, but probably for a different reason than most. Jordan was struck and killed by a Cincinnati police cruiser in August 2024 while the officer was responding with lights and siren to what had originally been dispatched as a shooting. The lawsuit raises questions about how that call was classified, what information became available while officers were responding, and whether the emergency response should have changed as the circumstances became clearer.

Those questions will be sorted out through the legal process, and I don't know enough about everything that occurred that evening to assign blame. What happened did, however, get me thinking about something much larger that I believe we need to talk about in public safety: our tendency to manufacture emergencies.

I don't say that as someone who has always gotten this right. Quite the opposite. When I was a young police officer, I drove patrol cars at speeds that I look back on today and wonder what in the hell I was thinking. If a serious call came out, I wanted to get there, and like a lot of young officers, I believed getting there faster meant I was doing my job better. Lights and sirens were part of policing, and I didn't spend nearly enough time thinking about the risk I was creating for myself or for everyone else on the road.

There are absolutely calls where seconds matter, and nothing I'm saying should be interpreted as an argument against emergency response. If an officer is fighting for his life, someone is actively shooting people, a child isn't breathing, or people are trapped inside a burning house, we need our first responders getting there as quickly as they reasonably and safely can. There is a reason we give police officers, firefighters, and paramedics the authority to operate differently under those circumstances.

What I question is how often the circumstances actually require it.

We have developed habits in public safety that we don't always stop and question. A call gets assigned a certain priority and officers run lights and sirens because that's how we've always responded to that type of call. An automatic fire alarm comes in, and multiple pieces of fire apparatus begin responding as an emergency even though nobody has reported smoke, nobody has reported fire, and no other information suggests an actual fire exists. None of this means we shouldn't respond. Of course we should. The question is whether every response needs to begin as an emergency and remain an emergency simply because that's how it started.

Every time we ask an officer to drive faster, every time a fire engine enters an intersection against a red light, and every time an ambulance moves through traffic with lights and siren, we are accepting additional risk. Sometimes that risk is completely justified by what is waiting for us at the other end. Sometimes I'm not sure it is.

Research supports taking that risk seriously. A study examining 2,406 police-vehicle crashes in Iowa found police vehicles were 1.8 times more likely to crash while operating in emergency mode than during normal driving. Interestingly, the researchers didn't simply focus on driver training. They also suggested that cultural approaches emphasizing transportation safety alongside the need to reach a scene quickly may be warranted.

EMS research raises similar questions. A national study examining approximately 19 million 911 responses found that ambulance use of lights and sirens was associated with higher crash risk. During the response phase, the adjusted odds of a crash were 1.5 times greater with lights and sirens; during patient transport, they were 2.9 times greater.

Of course, lights and sirens save time. That's why we use them, and research has found varying amounts of time savings depending on the system and circumstances. One urban EMS study found an average savings of about one minute and 46 seconds, while another urban study found an average savings of approximately three minutes. I'm not interested in arguing that a minute or two doesn't matter. There are circumstances where it absolutely does.

What matters is whether those minutes are likely to make a meaningful difference on the call we're actually responding to. Instead of making emergency response a continually evolving, risk-based decision, I think we sometimes let a dispatch code, a policy, or simply organizational habit make that decision for us.

The fire service provides a good example, although I want to be careful here because I am not a fire chief and I'm certainly not suggesting I know exactly how many pieces of apparatus should respond to every type of fire call. Fire departments have legitimate reasons for getting sufficient resources moving toward a potential structure fire before they know exactly what they have.

But an automatic residential fire alarm at two o'clock in the afternoon, with no additional calls, no reports of smoke or flames, and no indication that anyone is trapped, presents a very different risk picture than an alarm followed by neighbors calling 911 to report heavy smoke coming from the house. The information is different, so it seems reasonable that the response should be different as well.

The fire service itself has been looking at this issue. Research involving three U.S. fire departments representing urban, suburban, and rural environments found that all three identified emergency response as an important collision risk. Each chose policies or standard operating procedures intended to reduce unnecessary Code 3 responses, including reevaluating dispatch protocols to identify lower-risk calls that could be handled without lights and sirens.

This isn't about criticizing firefighters, police officers, paramedics, or dispatchers. It's about risk management and making sure the response matches what we actually know at the time.

There is also a resource issue worth considering. Every officer, ambulance, or piece of fire apparatus committed to one incident is potentially unavailable for another. Fuel, maintenance, equipment wear, and increasingly expensive emergency vehicles also add costs. Cost should never dictate an inadequate response to a legitimate emergency, but when we're examining calls that routinely turn out not to be emergencies, I think it is fair for leaders to consider the entire picture.

The larger concern, however, remains the risk to people. Lights and sirens aren't a force field. They don't guarantee that the driver approaching the next intersection sees us, that someone hears the siren, that a pedestrian won't step into the roadway, or that another motorist will react the way we expect.

Every emergency response involves a tradeoff. We are accepting additional risk to our responders and the public because we believe getting to the destination faster is important enough to justify it. Plenty of situations make that tradeoff easy to justify. I just don't know that we spend enough time examining the ones where it isn't.

That brings me back to Cincinnati.

According to records discussed in the lawsuit, the call that preceded Amir Jordan's death began as a reported shooting, but additional information was received while officers were responding. The suspect was reportedly no longer there, and other details were being added to the call. Whether those facts legally or operationally required downgrading the response is something others will have to determine, and I don't think it would be appropriate to reach that conclusion based solely on what is publicly available.

What interests me is the larger question of whether our systems, our policies and, most importantly, our culture encourage people to continually reassess the need for an emergency response once it has begun.

A 911 call isn't frozen in time. Information changes, and our response should be able to change with it. An automatic alarm that begins as an unverified call can quickly become a confirmed structure fire requiring substantially more resources. A call dispatched as a routine disturbance can suddenly become an officer calling for help. When circumstances change in that direction, we don't hesitate to upgrade the response.

We should be equally comfortable going the other direction. If information comes in telling us the threat is gone, the situation is stable, or the circumstances no longer require an emergency response, slowing people down shouldn't be viewed as hesitation or a lack of urgency. It should be viewed as good decision-making.

This is where I think culture becomes more important than policy. If young officers learn that the good cops are the ones who get there first, they'll drive accordingly. If emergency response becomes routine rather than exceptional, people stop questioning whether it is necessary. And if supervisors routinely race across town to calls that don't require it, the people working for them learn what the organization actually values.

I know because I was once that young officer. Nobody needed to tell me to drive fast. I wanted to get there, and I believed getting there faster meant I was doing my job better. That's why I don't see this primarily as a driver's problem. I see it as a leadership and organizational-culture issue.

Organizations teach through policy, but they also teach through what they tolerate, what they reward, and what their leaders model. If we want people making better decisions behind the wheel, then we have to create an environment where slowing down when circumstances no longer justify an emergency response is considered good judgment rather than a lack of commitment to the call.

I also think public-safety leaders should be willing to look at their own data. How many times did their officers, firefighters, or paramedics respond with lights and sirens last year? What types of calls were they responding to? How many units went emergency to the same incident? How often did additional information change the nature of the call, and how often did someone actually change the response because of it? Most importantly, how many of those calls ultimately involved circumstances where arriving a minute or two sooner was likely to make a meaningful difference?

I don't know what those answers will look like from one organization to another, and I'm not suggesting there is a universal response model that works for every community. Geography, staffing, call volume, and available resources all matter. A rural fire district and a major metropolitan department face very different challenges, just as a five-officer police department operates under circumstances very different from an agency with hundreds or thousands of officers.

An organization may look closely at its emergency responses and conclude that it is getting this exactly right. But I think there is value in actually looking rather than assuming that a practice makes sense simply because it has been part of public safety for decades.

Nobody wants an officer driving casually while another officer is screaming for help. Nobody wants firefighters unnecessarily delayed while people are trapped inside a burning home, and nobody wants paramedics sitting in traffic when someone is experiencing a truly time-critical medical emergency. Nothing about this discussion changes that.

Lights and sirens are an important public-safety tool, and there are times when using them is unquestionably worth the additional risk. What I am suggesting is that their use should be an intentional decision based on what we know at that moment, with a willingness to continually reassess that decision as circumstances change.

I spent many years believing that getting there faster meant I was doing the job better. Experience has changed the way I look at that. There are still plenty of calls where I would want our first responders getting there as quickly as they reasonably can, and I don't apologize for that.

But there are also plenty of times when the best decision may be to slow down. The challenge for those of us who lead public-safety organizations is making sure our people understand the difference.

Sources & Further Reading

Missikpode, C., Peek-Asa, C., Young, T., & Hamann, C. (2018). Does crash risk increase when emergency vehicles are driving with lights and sirens? Accident Analysis & Prevention, 113, 257–262.

Watanabe, B. L., Patterson, G. S., Kempema, J. M., Magallanes, O., & Brown, L. H. (2019). Is Use of Warning Lights and Sirens Associated With Increased Risk of Ambulance Crashes? A Contemporary Analysis Using National EMS Information System (NEMSIS) Data. Annals of Emergency Medicine, 74(1), 101–109.

Brown, L. H., Whitney, C. L., Hunt, R. C., Addario, M., & Hogue, T. (2000). Do warning lights and sirens reduce ambulance response times? Prehospital Emergency Care, 4(1), 70–74.

Ho, J., Lindquist, M., et al. (1998). Time saved with use of emergency warning lights and sirens during response to requests for emergency medical aid in an urban environment. Annals of Emergency Medicine.

Bui, D. P., Pollack Porter, K., Griffin, S., et al. (2017). Risk management of emergency service vehicle crashes in the United States fire service: process, outputs, and recommendations. BMC Public Health, 17, 885.