The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - How to Get Through Planning Line of Duty Death (LODD) Services | BTS #45

Episode Date: November 19, 2019

In this episode I share what I think are best practices from my own experiences and based on conversations around the topic with some of my friends and colleagues about planning for the death of our Brothers and Sisters in Public Safety.

Please silence your cell phones, hold all sidebar conversations to a minimum, and we'll get started with Between the Slides in 3, 2, 1. Lo, there do I see my father. Lo, there do I see my mother and my sisters and my brothers. Lo, there do I see the line of my people back to the beginning. Lo, they do call to me. They bid me take my place among them in the halls of Valhalla, as the Viking prayer from the movie The Thirteenth Warrior, or some of you even more may recognize that from, I believe, the Michael Crichton book, Eaters of the Dead. To me, it speaks to, one, it's kind of cool sounding but also to in that rage of battle particularly the vikings their call out to their ancestors that they're going to join them they're going to be there with them their family the other brothers and sisters

they're with and in this episode 45 line of duty incident action planning, the hardest deployment you'll ever have. I'm going to share some practical tips and some emotional tips and include some things based on discussions I had with good friends I just saw who between myself and them have been part of at least five to 10 planning teams for line of duty deaths or attendees, unfortunately, and how critical this is. If there's one deployment that you should get right 100% or as close to that as you can, it is planning the services, the memorials, the processions, all the components we'll speak of for someone you know, which I've been unfortunate, a teammate and someone I was in the same department with. Two different individuals.

One individual ironically took place in the first person's line of duty ceremonies. And then a couple of years later, unfortunately, the ceremony was for him. I've attended folks who were sick, folks who suddenly passed, were killed in the line of duty, and a mix. And I know a lot of you out there have as well. And it's heavy, but it's critical. And a good friend of mine with some good talks that we had this past weekend inspired me to kind of share this. I'd talked about this before, or at least I guess I did in my head, thought about it. Because again, it's another specific aspect of planning and opportunity to do good work in one of the worst of times.

So on this episode, I'm going to go between the slides five with it, stick with that traditional format that got us started here. I'm your host, Kevin Pinnell. The first thing I would say, and some of this is based on objectives from plans that I helped put together. Some is based on discussions, as I said. But the first thing is, all of us to remember, it is all about the service member and their family. Period. That's the whole reason that we're together, that we'll cry together, that we'll be mad together, that we'll put all these resources together, rent the spaces, move the vehicles, get dressed up, remember them, honor them. It's for the service member and their family.

We will make the SMART objectives fit this guidance. Everything we do will be focused on that, period. We'll focus on the honorable and ceremonial tributes that come with the services, particularly public safety, pipes and drums, those traditional very paramilitary services, the comfort and support of the family, the wishes of the service member. So some service members across all different services, you know, that the topic of firefighter cancer is pretty more well known or more openly discussed, let's say these days, but you know, cancer strikes anyone across all walks of life or other diseases. So let's say you have a member of your department, of your agency that gets sick, they fought, and they lose that battle. That hopefully along the way they've left you with some guidance on what they would like. That needs to absolutely be honored and one of the objectives that you work towards. hopefully, and I have not been great at this, and hopefully you all have been, is that even if you don't have a sickness, that if you're in public safety or if you're in the military, if you have

a dangerous job, that you have a living will, that you can leave your wishes on what you want to happen as well. It helps everybody that is here to help give you and your family the best service and hopefully the best closure that the last smart objective should also include cooperation among the partners right there's no place at all for ego here of who you know wants to show whatever patch have more apparatus, whatever. It's partnership. It's what do the family and them want, what do the service member want. Let's make sure we have crisp ceremonies.

It's honorable. We're doing the traditions for our given service, and we have great partnership. The second thing that I think was absolutely fantastic from one of the department leaders that not really led he did he led by decentralizing right so he led by allowing the team to know some of the things I discussed previously like hey here's what we're going to do but also saying okay you all get this done and really emphasizing so the second of the between the slides five state in no uncertain terms that emotions are okay and acceptable. Public safety, military, some traditional other businesses, you know, people hold things in.

People are afraid or embarrassed maybe to cry or be mad or whatever emotion in front of other people, in front of other men, other women, whatever. So let everyone know if you're sitting there and you are filling out the 215 on the wall chart or you're typing up some form and you just break down and cry because you think about the last time you spent with that service member, good for you because it will help you feel better. It's totally okay. And we will be there for you. That's the environment that doing a planning cycle for a line of duty death should have, right? It is going to be heavy. Every time you're in the room, you're talking through the details of this, and that is absolutely okay. Some things to consider that are important is have counseling for the family and coworkers on site, right? You know, we try and be great listeners

for each other. We're not professionals. And sometimes we need to have that available. Sometimes we also need someone that's totally disconnected from it, right? So we'll be there for each other. Absolutely. That doesn't mean don't talk to each other, but it pays to have some help out there. And encourage your incident management team and the other planning team members to use those services. If they're not comfortable maybe talking to their coworkers, which in the military public safety business and some others, they're actually the most comfortable because you can relate.

Then consider using those services and talking to those folks that are available there. And at the same time as part of this, you know, making sure emotions are okay and acceptable, make sure we're paying attention to the family, to the crowds, to the team members, for their physical and mental health. So we're looking around during the planning cycle during the ceremony afterwards, right? It's it's it's a it's a traumatic experience going through the details of planning, especially when you know somebody, and you see the impact it has on other friends of yours on you on their family and friends. It's a big deal. So it's going to be emotional, emotional, and that's fine. It's totally okay. The third thing is ask for outside help from neighboring partners and agencies.

When you are so close to losing someone that's part of your team, part of your unit, part of your agency, it is hard and you need to be able to focus on taking care of you, taking care of that person's family and not the practical running of a planning cycle. And this will vary a bit depending on the parts of the plan or at least my two cents it does and some of the things that I've seen. But this is the real opportunity to lean on your mutual aid partners and regional contacts so we on this podcast many times have talked about the importance of relationships ahead of time before something bad happens before it's the worst day certainly before one of these which is the worst day right so that's when you want to say you know what we could really use your help and practical things not just the planning cycle not just you know shuffling people around for the ceremonies but

covering duty stations covering precincts right covering dispatch if if you have a skill set that can help another locality continue to function because unfortunately not everything stops because we lost someone right and and that's tough but that's day-to-day life and it has to keep going people are still going to get hurt in other parts people you know are still going to call 9-1-1 whether it's for real reasons or not and so we need to ask our partners hey we we want to have all or most of our agency folks at this ceremony. How can you help us? And I, for the folks in central Virginia,

tip my hat and I'm just all inspired at the, unfortunately, multiple times that that's had, have, has had to happen in the past where, you know, mixes of agencies are covering other localities, responding to 911 calls there. And that is true partnership, true brotherhood and sisterhood, true kindness to each other. And we have to ask for that. And a lot of times folks will reach out because they know. Circles are small in public safety. Circles are small in the military and similar same units and even in office workplaces. And so it's a great opportunity to leverage those. And I think you'll find often you won't have to reach out far before somebody reaches out to you. Other resource or another resource is a local assistance state team or LAST. And so you

can request this that helps coordinate. And again, it's an outside agency whose job it is to help with these line of duty death plannings and cover and help us make sure we cover everything. And it's through the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation. But it's a partnership between the Department of Justice, the Bureau of Justice Assistance, and the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation. So it's a way to bring someone in and help you cover all the bases, right? Because again, we want this to be, it's going to be the hardest deployment we've done, the hardest planning cycle, but we want it to be the best, the absolute best. And so these last folks, these local assistance state team folks, and if you look up National Fallen Firefighters Foundation, and they have a website, you can look

at your state's rep. And if you can't find that it's pretty, it's listed pretty well, it's a great site. Then you want this person to help guide you and you can staff up with with who you want, or maybe some of the suggestions that I have here that I've seen done. But they're great resources. They're great people. They're folks from the industry, right from from the given police fire, dispatch, EMS, whatever industry that you can partner with, and that are very helpful. I kind of touched on this a few minutes ago, my fourth between the slides five for line of duty death planning is to work the process because this one counts more than ever, right? Is there's ever a time you do not want to skimp on things. And when you have the opportunity, there's not an incident when you have the time to put the

work into plan really, really well. It's to honor one of your own people or honor your neighbors, people or your neighboring teammates. So you may be coming in to help. You may be that person, that mutual aid person. Well, you don't want them to have to worry about everything. So keep it sharp. Work the process. Cover your angles.

Make this the best work that you've done in some of the hardest situations and some of the hardest emotional environments. And so I'm going to give some practical suggestions on org build out that hopefully is helpful. There's examples out there, line of duty death, incident action plans. You could reach out to me. You can reach out probably to folks or the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation if you want to look at an incident action plan and see examples of it. And I can provide like generic ones. I don't want to share some of the actual ones.

But then you can get an idea of what does this look like. And so here's an example. And for the folks that aren't incident command folks necessarily, I'll try and kind of bridge that gap. But this is really focused for those incident management team or public safety folks or practitioners. So the command staff, so again, your incident commander, your public information officer, your liaison officer, your safety officer, pull in that last person. And a great example I saw was have them be the incident commander, right? So you can have them come in and consult. You can certainly have one of the neighboring localities or partners or choose to

do it yourself. If you choose to do it yourself, again, that's a lot. You're trying to take care of your agency, of your people, and you're trying to plan this and emotions are going to get tied up. So if you bring in that last rep or a partner rep with your neighboring partners to fill out those big roles, it's going to pay off dividends to help you focus on your people and your family and their family or the service member's family that was lost. You'll have agency administrators and organizational reps. You'll have chiefs, of course, other officers from other agencies, local and regional partners.

And again, this is where we get right into it, the funeral home and burial ground representatives at the Memorial garden or cemetery or wherever. Um, and again, you know, when you go on a typical deployment, unless your job or your specific assignment perhaps is body recovery or something like that, you're, you don't typically think about funeral homes and burial grounds, right? It's how many sandbags, how many personal flotation devices, how many, you know, high speed, whatever's do we need to solve these problems right now. So this is where you're going to get into the reality check of planning for a line of

duty death, where you are talking about moving the remains of someone, you know, or that, you know, through your partners or, you partners or whatever that relationship is. But you've got to have that representation. And these are experts in their field. They're going to help you know and make better decisions on viewings and processions and crowd control and all these things on the footprint of the burial ground. So you need to have that representation. For planning, this is a personal planning process, especially if you are following the wishes of somebody that left that behind

already in a will, or if it's a sudden thing where you didn't necessarily have that. This is where you do want some local agency involvement, right? With, with regional partnership. So, you know, this was their person, this is their planning cycle. So your plan chief that's going to facilitate that should probably be pretty close to home. Do they have to be? No. Is there a case to say, have that also be someone else? Sure. But it depends. You have to read the situation from the standpoint of, again, we have guidance from what they left us or we're going to work a planning cycle. We want someone in to help us and we'll just kind of check them along the way to, you know, make sure that it meets the needs of our agency and their family and everything like that. You know, within planning, we definitely need to have that demobilization.

Everyone's going home, right? We need to make sure that everybody comes in and goes out. Resource unit, especially if you're going to have a procession of vehicles, if you're going to have a bunch of folks at the site for the ceremony and then a procession and then also at the burial site, right? So how are you going to track those folks? Are you going to have a check-in? Hard to set up a check-in when it's a funeral, right? Now you can have folks and make sure they know, okay, we're going to line up in order of unit. We're going to line up this way

or that way. Having everyone that's going to do that when they're there for the funeral, go to a table, sign in when they're kind of not your resources for the team. They're there to attend the event and honor their people. It's hard to do. So could you do it? Yes. I don't know that that one's kind of up in the air and I'm a huge accountability resource unit guy, right? But we just need to make sure everybody has the message of what's happening and where we're going. Documentation unit. This is the hat I wore a couple times. So what I'll say for this is if you're the documentation unit leader for this, you need to make this incident action plan the best looking version that you've ever put together.

This is going to be in the hands of not just the people working on the ceremony, but potentially the family, potentially folks close to the family, your neighbors, right? They're going to get real information from this, which we'll get into in a little bit. And it needs to look spot on. This is the, as I've mentioned in the past, the fancy incident action plan for the VIPs because the VIPs here are the family, the close friends and agency mates, teammates, brothers and sisters, and they're going to see

this right and so that's very very important the other thing to consider in planning is a technical specialist or a gis specialist so this is where we definitely need some maps of the parking areas of the procession routes of the facility overhead routes, of the facility overhead. So a good old Google Earth type thing, and then lines on there or your GIS system, however you want to do it. But super clear at the site of the service, where we want people parking, where the, you know, the public or the apparatus, meaning the fire engines, ambulances, whatever it is, police cars, then how we're going to get from that site to the burial site. Is everyone going or not?

And then at the burial site, where does everybody park? So pretty heavy map and routing kind of ground support component to this. And so having a GIS person from your locality or your incident management team or your neighbor incident management team or neighbor locality is well worth it operationally as work in this process that's going to count more than really any other process you'll do still locality right this is their person they're going to want to and should be close to it and so staff that up you can supplement if it looks like they need help if they ask for help absolutely particularly when there's kind of regional honor guards.

But a lot of this is going to be that agency's service members. Some of their best friends are going to be the ones carrying the casket off the apparatus. So they are absolutely going to be involved. And some considerations in operations section for groups that you might want to consider is a visitation and viewing group, right? Some folks that are going to coordinate completely whenever that visitation and viewing is, is it at the site of the service a day before or not? Is it at the funeral home that you partnered with? However, that goes the church service group. So who's coordinating the activities at the church service traffic management? We mentioned that. So, you know, an operational group focused on traffic

management. Again, this is for the public. The ground support folks is for us, how we're going to get around as the incident management team people. The reception group. So is there a reception afterwards to meet and greet and give your best to the family, continue the celebration of life, right? And that's a lot of what this is, is, you know, celebrating these folks when they lived, but helping put that together. And if you've ever planned even having people over, imagine a reception for a line of duty death where there's hundreds of people there. It's a big deal.

And the production group, right? Audio, visuals, slideshows, music, microphones, all these practical things to make the words that folks close to the service member that was lost are going to say that the band's going to play, that the bagpipes come in the right way. All these different things are a production. And so why not give them their own group? So kind of leads well into logistics, right? So again, you know, the locality knows where they are. They know their place. They know where they want to have the service. They have the stuff to support this. So I would have a log chief, a ground support unit. So that procession of ambulances, fire trucks, police cars, military vehicles, whatever it is, ground support is going to help coordinate that.

And then if we do need to move some folks, say there's an academy class that's going to help with seating guests, right? So new cadets and fire police academy or dispatch academy or something, we can get them on a bus and help them get them to where they need to go. And then communications, right? So cell phones, sure, we're going to use those a ton, we're going to text, we're going to do that kind of stuff. But we're also going to go back to the old 800 megahertz radio or whatever handheld you have. And we're going to be coordinating a lot of things, right? Timing of people coming in the service out of the service. Are we ready to open the doors or not? Where should we queue up? Are we doing, you know, are we driving up in the apparatus and carrying

the casket off and putting it on a card and taking it inside and doing all these or you know we doing the gun salutes and all these factors so communications is a great bridge to make sure that we all know what's happening when and finance and admin critical right procurement there's a lot of materials that are going to need to be used purchased for you know from the flowers to the runners to, you know, the black badge bands or armbands or whatever's going on there, if folks don't already have those. And so a lot of considerations for buying things for the service. And so let your finance admin folks, you know, help out with that and really lead that. Number five, give yourself a break after this one. That's one of the most important, I think, in addition to quality of what you should put into something like this, the line of duty death planning cycle is that when you're done,

give yourself a break. If you're really good at incident action planning, you're going to be asked to incident action plan a lot. When it's sunny and it's an exercise and you do a couple of those back to back, it's no big deal. When there's a flood and you do one and then a few months later you do another maybe incident, it's a little more taxing

or maybe your tempo is a little more than that. It's a little more tiring. But unless you're moving or seeing just piles of bodies from a mudslide or a flood or something like that, it's still emotionally exhausting. But it is not like helping plan for a line of duty death and then doing it again within a relatively shorter period of time, and then going to one then doing it again, or being part of it or referencing or thinking about, you know, that often, even if you're not all in on one plan or the other, and, and some folks I know have been because they're good, they're really good at getting people together and planning these, they would do a great job. That takes a toll on them and everyone else on the team. And it doesn't mean that they're not honored to do it and that

I haven't been honored to do it. But I'll say if you're part of one of these teams, when you deliver the plan and the process and it's over and folks have gone home and that quiet hits, it's kind of like responding to a call. You have that tough call, right? And your adrenaline's going and you get through it and then the quiet hits. It's so quiet. And the problem with that is then you get to think about everything. Everything you had to consider when you planned, everything you saw, heard, smelled. And these are, you know, seeing maybe one of your best friends, their family that

you know, your agency mates, other folks from around the region, emotional roller coasters all across the board that I think at some times are more exhausting than any physical demand that you could put on yourself. So we're all tough. We've all seen horrible things in the public safety, incident management, military world. We've had other family and friends die, right? So part of life, even if it's our personal family or friends, folks outside of the services, the public safety service or military passed away. This one's a little bit different. This is one of us. And for folks that haven't been on the inside, so to speak, or part of the brotherhood or sisterhood of the military or public safety, or where you deploy and you do hard things together, it's different.

They are wearing your patch. You did sleep in a bunk next to them. You did sleep in a tent on a crappy inflatable mattress. You did road trip for hours. And this is what would happen if we died in the line of duty. So we get a glimpse and a feel of our mortality. Thinking, wow, is this what it would be like when I'm the one there? And that's a lot to think about.

That's a lot to consider. When you walk your mind through the last steps of one's physical body and seeing the impact on their family, fellow service members, it is unbelievably hard. It is also a great honor. It is an honor that I have taken part in,

that friends of mine have, that I don't wish on others. But when the time comes, if you're in a position to help, that I wish you the best to do the best job that you can. Because it is also a bit gratifying to help give peace to others, to make this process easier, and to get folks through some of the hardest times in their life, some of the darkest times in their life. So you deserve a break from the next deployment, and you should take it. So it's all about the family. Emotions are okay and completely acceptable. Get help from outside neighboring partners and agencies. Work the process because this one counts more than ever and give yourself a break after this one. You have earned it. Thank you all very much for considering some of the feedback I've given, for listening to previous episodes, for emailing me, getting in touch.

I look forward to hearing more from listeners. To my brothers and sisters out there that I got to spend some time with this past weekend, God bless you. I love you guys and gals. I appreciate everything you've done for me. I appreciate my family and friends. And I hope we all take that time. If you're listening, you probably know where to hear this, but iTunes, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Stitcher, and seems to be popular more lately. listening through Windows through a browser or something So that's pretty cool. If you want to reach me directly between the slides at gmail.com

Switch that up. I don't know why I made the goofy email I made before but this one seems to be more straightforward So again, thank you all very much to those of you out there wearing the uniform that have faced a line of duty death Godspeed to you and To those of you out there wearing the uniform that have faced a line of duty death, Godspeed to you. And healing, if it's happened recently, I wish you the best. And if you are going to be part of planning or already know you're on the honor guard or something like that, consider some of the points that I brought up. They will help you. Or I hope they do.

Stay safe out there, everyone. Godspeed.