Fire Fighters, Neighbourhoods and Social Identity: the relationship between the fire service and residents in Bristol

Implications for AFRS

As discussed at length above, the image of the fire service is very much one of fire fighting (Childs, Morris et al. 2004, Cooper 1995), and this is perpetuated both in recruitment and in the training school. Community safety work takes little precedence in training, with maybe half a day (out of three months) devoted to it, and, in my experience, being somewhat undermined by other staff at the centre. Many recruits and existing fire fighters expressed a sentiment to me that community safety work was not ‘what they joined to do’ although it actually comprises a significant proportion of their work time. As such, this creates a disjuncture between job expectation and job role, with the possibility of resentment accumulating both for the community safety work itself and for the community which requires it. Further, there is little publicity of community safety work, which means that residents remain unaware of this area of fire service work. Although this type of cultural change has already begun, for instance through the restructuring of the fire service in the 2000s (Bain, 2002), it is far from complete, and issues such as recruitment and publicity are currently undermining other organisational attempts at change.

At an organisational level, and despite the sponsorship of this research project, there remains a lack of acknowledgement of a problem in the relationship between the fire service and the community. Although there is recognition of the problem of assaults, there is incomprehension about the lower level resistance and hostility, with several senior managers I encountered, both within Avon and beyond, expressing doubts in my claims. There appears to be a degree of complacency within the service that they perform a valued task (granted), that they perform it well, and that the community are in agreement with this. However, in operational terms, there is a potential problem that to disabuse fire fighters of their high standing may make them question the value of their emergency work. Inevitably, these are issues of some sensitivity. Further, and although the danger of assaults is real and present, for a number of fire fighters, they are not taken very seriously. War stories abound, and for a number of participants, hostility from residents was taken in good humour as a bit of manly cut and thrust. This is undermining both to fire fighters who do take it seriously, and also to organisational attempts to catalogue and gauge the problem.

Thirdly, at an operational level, there is a need for greater sensitivity by the fire service to residents in Bristol neighbourhoods. Fire fighters are very visible in communities, and this has a two fold effect. Firstly, they draw attention to themselves in a number of different ways. Whilst this has clear purpose when responding to emergencies, the same features mean that in non-emergency situations they are just as visible. Further, the practice of working as a whole crew means that there can be five fire fighters in a situation that would only require one or two, and that in numbers, noise levels can also escalate. This potentially leads to residents being more able to see fire fighters behaving in ways of which they disapprove (such as chatting together by a fire engine, rather than engaging with local people), and drawing correlations about the whole service from this (Skogan, 2006). Secondly, the same factors also draw attention to residents, such as when a fire engine arrives at a property to conduct a home fire safety visit. In a number of neighbourhoods, residents have a natural reticence about engaging with public agencies (Mathers, 2008) and such a high profile visitation may direct more attention to the resident than they would have willingly experienced. Although some of these issues are, perhaps, unlikely to be changed, they are aspects of community work that the fire service could be more sensitive towards.

The final implication very much picks up on Skogan’s work (2006), which suggests that the public weight a negative encounter, in this case with the police, much more heavily than a positive one. Even in communities that are ostensibly law abiding and pro public services, there will be residents who are resistant to the fire service, possibly because they are law abiding, and who may feel that their concerns are not prioritised over those of harder to reach residents. The public have a tendency to be fickle and capricious, and, whilst it is a truism, the fire service are not going to be able to please all of them all of the time. However, if they come to acknowledge that, and to act with greater sensitivity to it, they may at least please some of the people, some of the time.

Reflecting on the process: looking back and looking forward

More detail is given in the methodology chapter on the ways in which I managed to navigate AFRS hierarchies and systems, however, this was only one aspect of the management of this project. Working on any project which is both inter-institutional and interdisciplinary is always likely to have some complexities, and there is no one way of negotiating such relationships. For example, contact with Bristol University proved to be little more than a formality, and once initial meetings had been held, none more were expected of me. Perhaps, given the chance to do things again, I would have worked harder on this relationship, but it was easy to get engrossed in the day to day minutiae of the project, and to an extent, this was to the detriment of external relations.

A further relationship to be managed was that with the different departments that my supervisors came from. Although funded under the Psychology stream from GWR, I have been based, along with one supervisor, for the duration of this research project in what started as the Faculty of the Built Environment, and which is now called the Faculty of Environment and Technology, whilst my other supervisor is in Psychology. Without a formal training in psychology, coming to an understanding of psychologists’ ways of doing things was an important, and ongoing, learning experience. Undertaking courses from a third faculty further demonstrated the differences between certain academic fields, as well as causing something close to a diplomatic incident, and I felt thankful on a number of occasions that using social identity approaches gave me insight as much to these relationships as to those between fire fighters and residents.

Of course, this research project was far more than a simple exercise in project management, and from the outset I had inherited a broad research brief, developed to secure the funding that enabled the project prior to my involvement. As I adapted to the strictures of the brief, I struggled, as no doubt many have before me, with the conflicting requirements to both fulfil the stipulations and to make the research my own. The most obvious change to the original requirements was the move away from quantitative work, although this is not an approach I would dismiss for further projects. There was, perhaps, also a stronger emphasis on place at the outset, and although spatial aspects, most typically neighbourhood, still feature in the research, I have focussed less on this than I might have done. However, and as discussed below, this could form an area for further research.

As I found my feet with the research project, and perhaps strove for individuality and my own take on things, there is every possibility I tried to move away from the original requirements, particularly as my research gained its own momentum. However, in the latter stages of the project, particularly following the disruptions that external life imposed, I found myself coming back to the brief time and again. Although I cannot truthfully say I stuck to the letter of it, I do feel that I have completed this project in the spirit of the original outline, although it is a shame that so few of the original stakeholders have been able to see it through to completion with me.

Nevertheless, the past four years have been an interesting time, and to an extent only really mark the beginning of this research enterprise. It has always been important for me for this research project to have a life beyond the academy, something which I have pursued through presentations at the fire service Research Event each year, and now, increasingly through journal publications. I have co-authored one paper which is due for publication (in Local Government Studies) in August 2011, and am currently preparing papers for submission to Urban Studies and Crime Prevention and Community Safety. These will address issues arising in the focus group study and around fire related anti social behaviour, respectively.

In addition to the dissemination work discussed above, there is also the scope to develop the work begun in this research project through further research. As with the studies undertaken in this research project, this could focus on the fire service, residents or the interaction between the two. Several potential research projects are outlined below, each requiring more or less new research and building to an extent on the work already conducted.

Building on work looking at the interaction between residents and fire fighters could help to test the ideas developed in this research project. Although focus groups and observations both discussed the interaction, the studies did not allow for change over time. A further study could take a longitudinal approach, interviewing residents before an interaction with the fire service, observing the interaction, and then interviewing them again. Alternatively, interviews could be conducted immediately following the interaction, and then at a later date, allowing for some months to pass. This would enable the impact of the interaction to be assessed, and for AFRS to judge more effectively if their current mechanisms for engagement are effective. It could also be possible to interview fire service personnel involved in the encounters on their perceptions of the experience. This would allow for a greater understanding of how they perceived the different encounters, and to what extent this mirrored the public’s perceptions of them.

Working with residents of the same neighbourhoods could also produce some interesting data. None of the residents I met with had directly experienced emergencies, and although it would need to be handled with great sensitivity, it would be interesting to look at how residents who have had emergency experiences viewed the fire service. Rather than meet with people who have themselves been in a fire, interviewing neighbours who had closely witnessed but not personally experienced a house fire could be insightful, with fewer of the associated ethical issues. Further, a number of fire services conduct follow up work with people affected by house fires. If this is the case for AFRS, it could be possible either to observe this work, or to use transcripts as data for secondary analysis.

One of the themes that came out of the neighbourhood work concerned the way in which residents use microgeographies to navigate their neighbourhoods. This work could be progressed, comparing perhaps more and less affluent neighbourhoods, or ones that are typified in different ways (for example inner city or peripheral). This could feed into both social and environmental psychology debates around identity and context. As an adjunct to this work, it could also be possible to look at how residents’ navigations of the neighbourhood differed from those of service providers and the implications of these different understandings of place.

A second theme that might bear up to further scrutiny is concerned with the change in relationship with the fire service, or with public services in general, according to lifestage. This could also be extended to look at differences according to lifecourse, for example with residents who lived in the city through the Second World War having different experiences of fire (as a weapon of war) and fire fighters (as volunteers, and in many cases female) than is currently the case. This could also link well with discussions of crime and anti social behaviour and the way in which these link to lifestage, building on the journal paper outlined above considering a typology of fire related ASB.

A final area in which further research could be conducted would return to the fire service, using them to source data, this time in a more quantitatively driven way. Building on the ways in which residents navigate their neighbourhoods, fire service data about the location of fires would be collated and mapped. This could, potentially, be accompanied by other data including hoax calls or home fire safety visits. A further layer of research could add other geo-demographic information including around household make up and other factors which the fire service see as contributing to risk. Using new mapping technologies, this would allow for a textured and informative representation of fire service data which could then be used as the basis for more qualitative work with both fire fighters and residents.

This section has outlined some further avenues for research which could be pursued following from this research project. When I started the research in 2007, the FRS was an under researched area. Although that situation is being addressed, there remains scope for a great deal more research, building on this research project, and linking to existing research areas, such as with social and place identity, neighbourhoods, and criminality and lifestage. In years to come, perhaps, fire service research will take its rightful place alongside research on the police and other emergency services.