After I 'retired' from taxi-driving, the volunteer fire department for my grandfather's (deceased) rural cabin sent a bunch of us to the Arizona State Fire School [0]. This organization provides training for small fire departments that don't have the resources to run their own training. Topics covered include basic firefighting, how to drive a firetruck, fire investigation (arson?), etc.

[0] https://www.facebook.com/Arizona-State-Fire-School-Arizona-S...

My firefighter superpower is 'vehicle extrication'. When people wreck their cars, firefighters' job is to stabilize the car and extract the people inside as quickly as possible. I don't know why the president of our volunteer fire department decided 3 of us needed to learn about Vehicle Extrication - we don't have a lot of traffic on the county road, nor much in the way of equipment to extricate people from their rolled cars...

At the state fire school's opening ceremony I realized the difference between firefighters and police officers: if the fire department is dispatched in response to your call, they will try to help you. If the police are dispatched in response to your call, part of their job is deciding whether there is an excuse to arrest you.

One of my passengers was mistakenly arrested. Those police officers put her in a bad situation, and it was my honor to help extricate her from the area around the county jail. She wasn't planning to get arrested that night, probably didn't have any of her friends' phone numbers committed to memory [1], and was hoping her friend would have money to pay me when we got to his house.

The diary about my insights about firefighting vs policing is "Ordinary Rendition: The Public Servants' Quagmire" - http://www.taxiwars.org/2017/10/ordinary-rendition-public-se...

This section is about my experience at fire school:

> The Public Servants' Quagmire

> [...] Police officers have a bit of a predicament: their official motto is to "protect and serve", but the politicians have given them no flexibility to fulfill their role.

> After I retired from taxi driving, I spent a couple days at fire school. During the opening ceremony I realized the difference between firefighters and police officers/sheriff's deputies.

> If the fire department is dispatched, they will do whatever they can to try to help you. Fire trucks are outfitted with all sorts of equipment that might be needed to save someone's day. These include not just fire hoses and other firefighting equipment, but also tools to cut up cars to extract people when the doors won't open, etc. Equipment on this Mesa special operations firetruck was once used to lift the light-rail train off of a drunk who'd passed out on the tracks: [Photo: Mesa Fire Department's Rapid Response/Special Operations Firetruck]

> No judgement calls are made by firefighters when responding to the incident at hand. In a future post I intend to tell of the time that I had to call on the city's firefighters to save the day. After the firefighters had disappeared into the night, the also-dispatched police officers decided they didn't need to make the situation worse, and also disappeared into the night.

> Discretion is the police officer's most important skill. But police are frequently pressured (performance evaluations, etc) to take actions that really just needlessly wreck people's lives.

> Another passenger told of the time she was being unruly, and how her family called the police for help dealing with her. After a while those police officers decided they didn't have any way to help, so "we're going to have to take you downtown." Her adult daughter protested, "THIS IS NOT WHY WE CALLED YOU", but the police officers were like, "whatevers". Arresting people is their job, even if that person really only needs a time-out from their situation.

[1] My earlier post about the importance of memorizing some phone numbers, Who Are Your Lifelines?: http://www.TaxiWars.org/who-are-your-lifelines/

(minor edits)