Tribute to First Responders: Protecting the community together

House fires, car accidents and active shooter situations, all have something in common.
Lincoln Police and Lincoln Fire and Rescue working together toward a solution.
“We have a great professional relationship with one another. We’re working with them daily. We show up to a lot of the same calls, be it medical or car accidents, a whole host of thing and really, we just kind of look out for each other,” says Ofc. Scott Parker, Lincoln Police Department.
Both departments tout what a great working relationship they have with each other. Lincoln Fire Chief Micheal Despain can attest to that having worked in different agencies across the country.
“My experience here has been just absolutely great. Chief Bliemeister and his team are just awesome to work with, very cooperative. In my experience, when you see police and fire get along as well as they do here, the real winner is the community,” says Chief Michael Despain, Lincoln Fire and Rescue.
The chiefs along with other public safety officials meet at least once a week. When big events are coming up on the calendar, they start meeting well ahead of time to come up with a game plan.
“The example would be Keystone pipeline or when there was an execution at the state prison. Those are things that we met with literally weeks and months before, and then more often as we got closer with a plan. What happens if something goes bad, if everything goes good what does it look like, how are we going to communicate, so we do that quite a bit,” says Despain.
Along with the meetings, the departments get together for training.
“We do a number of training events throughout the year and it kind of depends what the topic is that we see coming,” says Despain.
Making sure communication is ironed out before the real deal, which LFR and LPD both say is the key to success.
“We have the ability to openly communicate with one another and that makes it tremendously easier for both of us, I think,” says Parker.
One area where the two departments are improving their teamwork is active shooter situations.
"Basically, we would create a zone within the building that is considered safe, as safe as it can be in that particular environment. That’s kind of where the triage area would be, and we would take one or two paramedics with a group of officers to where we know that there is a victim, get them, bring them back to the casualty collection point, triage them and then get them out so they are off to a higher level of care,” says Parker.
No matter the incident, Lincolnites are lucky to have two departments focused on the same objective.
“We’re both out there essentially for the same goal of protecting people and protecting life,” says Parker.