The Chicago Fire Department still doesn’t accurately measure response times to fire and medical emergencies twelve years after the inspector general’s office sounded the first of multiple alarms on the issue, a new report concluded Thursday.
In 2013, then-Inspector General Joe Ferguson reported that CFD did not meet the National Fire Protection Association’s standards for emergency response times and that its internal reports “lacked the elements necessary to accurately assess” the veracity of CFD’s claims that it was exceeding national standards.
Two follow up reports — in 2015 and 2021 — reached similar conclusions. On Thursday, Ferguson’s successor, Deborah Witzburg, reported zero progress on the same front.
The Chicago Fire Department has “neither hired staff to assist with data analytics,” nor has it “found another method to analyze” information gaps. Twelve years after the first IG report, CFD has not even “established and documented response time goals” nor worked with the Office of Emergency Management and Communications to “assess the root cause of data gaps,” her advisory states.
“Despite having first received similar recommendations in 2012, CFD has not yet implemented critical performance measures,” the report quotes Witzburg as saying. “This undermines CFD’s accountability and misses important opportunities to evaluate whether the department is meeting its core mission of promoting fire safety, providing emergency care and extinguishing fires.”
Without accurate and reliable data, Chicago residents and businesses “cannot be assured that CFD is delivering emergency services in a timely, equitable and effective manner, particularly in communities that may already face disparities in public safety outcomes,” Witzburg said.
The Chicago Fire Department has blamed the lack of progress on the city’s financial crisis, claiming the Office of Budget and Management repeatedly denied its “budget requests for personnel and resources to conduct data analysis,” the new report states.
An alternative plan to have the University of Chicago embed analysts in the Fire Department to assist building operational dashboards was thwarted by the Department of Technology and Innovation, CFD claimed. Technology officials concluded that the arrangement was not permitted under the controlling “master Data Sharing Agreement” between the city and the U of C.
Pat Cleary, president of the Chicago Firefighters Union Local 2, believes that all of those claims are a smokescreen. Cleary believes the city is not interested in collecting data because an accurate measure of response times to fire and medical emergencies would show how much more equipment the city needs.
“They don’t want to have to purchase more ambulances and more rigs and hire more employees. It costs money and they’d rather spend it elsewhere,” Cleary said. “Those reports not only say that they need more ambulances. They also say that the response times for fire engines and fire trucks in certain areas of the city are inadequate. They don’t meet NFPA standards.”
Cleary said CFD has responded to all four IG reports on emergency response times by claiming that “they can’t measure the data properly” because firefighters and paramedics “don’t hit the `en route button’ and the `on-scene button’ properly.’ “
But that claim doesn’t hold water, he said.
“They’re lying. They do have a way of measuring it because we also report via radio by saying, `I’m on the scene.’ We don’t just press buttons,” Cleary said. “They’re saying, `We don’t have the accurate data.’ That way, they can say, `We don’t know whether we need more ambulances. We don’t know whether we need more engines or trucks.’ They’re playing stupid.”
When he was on the field and assigned to an engine, Cleary recalled having waited 45 minutes for an ambulance to arrive on the scene.
“We were giving a person CPR for 45 minutes,” he said.
Witzburg was asked whether she agrees with Cleary that the city is stalling.
“We’re certainly not in a position to determine that’s not the case without the data,” she said. “We cannot improve what we cannot measure. And for a very long time, despite repeated recommendations for operational corrections, the city has been unable to get hold of these emergency response times and, therefore, unable to determine whether they need to be improved and how we might do that.”