SEATTLE — Seattle City Council members will soon vote on whether to approve a measure that would give Seattle Fire Department (SFD) personnel protections under the city's obstruction ordinance.
Currently, Seattle law makes it a crime to physically interfere with "public officers" responding to emergencies, but it does not explicitly include all firefighters, EMTs and other personnel.
"Multiple times a day, SFD's EMTs struggle to gain access, again, to the disenfranchised, those struggling with mental health issues, those struggling with substance abuse issues, and more," SFD Assistant Chief Chris Lombard said in his remarks to council members Tuesday. "Incidents and incident scenes are often very chaotic and when EMTs are most focused on the surroundings, they struggle to focus on the patients and to provide the best of patient care, always having to look over their shoulders."
City staff shared that the obstruction ordinance would give authorities recourse for people interfering with the ability of SPD staff to do their jobs before incidents escalate to the level of assault. SFD says it has already responded to a large number of calls this year that have resulted in threatening behavior toward it's unarmed members.
"Our members are experiencing this with such regularity that we're starting to have trouble getting them to even report them - they're feeling almost helpless or hopeless in some of these regards," Lombard said.
IAFF Local 27 President and Ballard Ladder 8 Lt. Kenny Stuart says he's seen and experienced many years of trying to resolve this issue, and is grateful help is coming.
"We need help with these incident scenes so we can do our job and we need to reduce this threat of violence and other incidences that keep us from performing our duties," Stuart said. "Everybody knows what it's like to be threatened with violence. It changes your focus of attention, and what we're looking for here is the ability of our firefighters to focus 100% of their attention and efforts on the job at hands."
He pointed out that it impacts not just SFD personnel, but the public. In addition to impacting crews' abilities to perform, people interfering too close to a response can invade the privacy of a patient.
Questions were raised about whether allowing for safety perimeters would impede the public's ability to protest. Staff said people would not be impacted if they were not interfering with SFD's abilities to perform their duties. SFD says it is supportive of First Amendment rights, and this mechanism is simply about creating a safe, temporary bubble to help provide patient care.