Command Staff ICS Training

The results of this class brought home some points to me as an instructor, also. It stated loud and clear that, as a member of the command staff, one of my most difficult challenges will be to fight the complacency that is all too common in our folds. Too often, we are caught up in the rut of everyday-same-old-thing type of feeling. Another thing that works against us is that as we move farther away from the pulse of the street and the heightened awareness that it brings, we forget just how quick things can go wrong. We also, just by the nature of being human, want to put the bad things behind us and move on to more pleasant things. None of us wants to open the wounds caused by some of the bad things we have seen, and none of us wants to appear to be second-guessing someone who was there or in charge on those days. It is especially true if a brother or sister public safety official was a victim of one of these events. Keeping this in mind, I will put my wishes out here for you. I truly feel that if I was ever the victim of an incident in which I paid the ultimate price for a mistake, I hope that every command staff member would analyze it to the utmost to find out what went wrong. Having done that, they developed some sort of procedure or training to prevent it from ever happening to someone else. Let us challenge ourselves to pay attention to lessons learned, so that, as is all too common in this field, history does not repeat itself.