It isn’t a problem when you wear full PPE … for the entire shift. LAFD’s coverup order is debated.
In the Los Angeles City Fire Department they have been wrestling with body art. A spring order requires all tattoos to be covered whenever on duty. Los Angeles Times columnist Sandy Banks is looking at this issue.
While for some that just means wearing long sleeve shirts. For Captain Carlos Caceres “that means wearing long-sleeved shirts, turtlenecks, long pants, even gloves, around the clock”.
Here are more excerpts from the column:
It’s a “grooming issue,” said Capt. Armando Hogan, spokesman for Chief Douglas Barry. “We need to make sure we’re professional-looking. We’ve got an image to uphold.”
Image?
This is a department that recently cost the city $16 million in payoffs to firefighters who’ve been insulted, harassed and discriminated against on the job. And they’re worried that people will think they’re unprofessional because a guy has his kids’ names inked on his arm or flames crawling up his neck?
Give me a department full of guys like Caceres, an 18-year veteran who has his entire body inked with family names and faces, images of fire and comic book characters.
“I don’t care what the guy next to me looks like,” he told me. “Can you go into a house and pull a body out? Can you tie the right knot to get a guy off a cliff? That’s what matters.”
Or John O’Connor, a 20-year veteran whose forearms are covered with tattooed tributes to other firefighters. “When I show up on an emergency call, I don’t think anybody’s saying, ‘I don’t want the tattooed guy to touch Grandma.’ “
I think he’s right. When I see tattoos on a firefighter, I’m inclined to think “strong and bold,” somebody who’ll rescue me or my daughters from danger.
The LAFD brass and firefighters’ union have been haggling over tattoo proposals for years.
The union and an independent fact-finding panel backed a ban on profane or offensive tattoos, or those that might imply gang ties and threaten fire crews’ safety in the field. That makes sense to me.
But the department instead required that all tattoos be covered all the time.
The union has filed a grievance because the policy is being enforced haphazardly. Some battalion chiefs are patrolling dorms, making sure tattooed firefighters sleep in shirts and pants. Others, said union vice president Jon McDuffie, “are using common sense.”
“You’ve got a guy who’s been in the Marine Corps, has the tattoos, has been on this department for 20 years. And now all of a sudden he looks unprofessional? In Los Angeles . . . where you’ve got doctors with dreadlocks, earrings and tattoos?”
Honestly, I’m not a tattoo fan. I’m still wrestling with my teenage daughters over the issue, trying to persuade them not to permanently mark up their bodies with literary quotes, flowers and Tinkerbells.
But the Fire Department’s coverup decree strikes me as impractical, unsafe and imposed so ham-handedly, I can almost smell the lawsuits brewing.
