Sex in ambulance, sexual harassment, stolen property – Bad week for San Francisco FD

No matter how good a large organization is there will always be a certain amount of bad news to deal with. For the San Francisco Fire Department it must seem like this year’s quota all surfaced over the last six days.

How fast you get past bad news often is the result of how it’s handled by the leadership of the department. There are many public safety organizations today that don’t wait for the news media to uncover its secrets. Some forward thinking fire and police chiefs have had a great deal of success delivering the bad news themselves.

Whether you share it first or it’s discovered by reporters, generally the best practice is to get all the bad news out at once, apologize if necessary and explain what the department is doing to prevent this from happening again. It appears the San Francisco Fire Department doesn’t embrace any of these concepts.

The first and most significant story this week is the sexual harassment case that broke on Tuesday and has slowly leaked out ever since.

Michael Bodley, San Francisco Chronicle:

Firefighters at a station in San Francisco’s Chinatown allegedly waged a six-month campaign of harassment against a female co-worker, urinating in her bed and taunting her with verbal abuse, officials said Tuesday.

The investigation prompted Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White to order the transfers of all officers from Station 2 at 1340 Powell St.

In a letter obtained by The Chronicle, Hayes-White wrote that “egregious harassing and retaliatory behavior” by firefighters at Station 2 created a “hostile work environment based on gender.”

In the Tuesday article, Chief Hayes-White refused to comment and a department spokesman declined to talk about the specifics of this case. Instead, he issued a very generic statement that didn’t address any of the facts or the obvious questions. Of course, just because a department takes such a stance doesn’t mean the story will just go away.

On Thursday, reporter Bodley came back with a follow-up story. This featured a leaked document from August 31 that reveals a lot more detail about the investigation:

When a female firefighter scored a choice spot at a station in San Francisco’s Chinatown, she was immediately met with resistance by her new male colleagues, including one who asked her an intimidating question: “Do you know how difficult your time is going to be?”

A document obtained by The Chronicle outlines details from an independent investigation into just how miserable her life was made in the “male-dominated” culture of Station 2 at 1340 Powell St., one of the busiest firehouses in the city. The question presented to the female firefighter before her first shift even began was the start of a systematic harassment campaign intended to drive her out of the firehouse, the investigation concluded.

In the second article, the department took a similar same stance about commenting: “Through a spokesman, Hayes-White declined to comment on the ‘personnel matter.’ A spokesman also declined to comment on the specific case, citing it as a personnel manner.”

So, after that very clear statement about the department’s policy of commenting on a “personnel matter”, you might be surprised by what happened a day later. On Friday, Chief Hayes-White commented on a personnel matter during what should have been a positive celebration of the department:

“That’s something, obviously, that we don’t tolerate,” said Chief Joanne Hayes-White, after an event at Fisherman’s Wharf to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the San Francisco Fire Department.

She said the ordeal the male firefighters put their female co-worker through in an attempt to drive her out of the firehouse was a disappointment.

On Friday, she described the disciplinary process as “unfolding and evolving” and said any firefighter found culpable could face additional consequences, including suspension or termination.

Chief Hayes-White did what so many fire and police chiefs have done before her. She relied on the knee-jerk, BS, all purpose reply, “it’s a personnel matter.” It’s usually used as an effort to buy time while hoping the crisis at hand will go away. For minor stories it might work. When you have a significant reputation management issue like this one, it just delays the inevitable and stretches out the story into multiple days of news coverage. The result is looking like a department and a chief under siege as more reporters pile on, asking lots of questions. The image of the leader and the organization suffer and the chief almost always ends up talking about the “personnel matter.”

Also on Friday, story number two broke about the San Francisco Fire Department. This one is from KTVU-TV:

A city paramedic has been recommended to be fired after the worker allegedly had sex with a civilian in the back of an ambulance while on duty, sources told KTVU.

The man, whose identity was pending, was allegedly caught in the city-owned ambulance while his partner was driving the vehicle, the source said.

The boyfriend of the woman who was involved in the act with the paramedic found out and filed a complaint with the Fire Department. The incident occurred several months ago.

KPIX-TV reports that having sex in the ambulance is called joining “the lights and siren club.” After days of bad coverage about the sexual harassment issue you might think the department learned some lessons and responded differently to this incident. If you thought that, you’d be wrong. Here’s the response, according to KPIX-TV: “Because of the internal investigation, the fire department won’t confirm specific details on the incident.”

The third bit of had news hit yesterday (Saturday) and is from reporter Jaxon Van Derbeken of KNTV-TV:

A San Francisco firefighter is under criminal investigation and could lose his job after police seized dozens of fittings and fire hoses from a building where he runs a sprinkler business in the city’s Mission District.

Mitchell Lee, 51, owns Pacific Automatic Sprinkler Co., where a fire started outside on the evening of April 14 that damaged the side of the building at 2601 Harrison St. After firefighters doused the flames, one fire captain spotted department issued hoses and fittings inside a garage.

There’s no indication with this story of any comments from the San Francisco Fire Department.

These three stories lingered somewhat secretly in the San Francisco Fire Department for anywhere from about one to eight months. This past week should make it painfully obvious that it’s hard for the San Francisco Fire Department to keep a secret. But that’s a universal truth for almost any organization today.

The sooner you accept the idea that you can no longer control the secrets lurking within your organization, the easier it will be to come up with a strategy to help you deal effectively with most reputation management issues.

What you are more likely to control is the public seeing your organization as one that builds trust in the community through transparency, openness and leadership that is accountable when something goes wrong. If those are your goals, “We can’t talk about it because it’s a personnel matter” won’t get you where you need to go.