The Resident
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FIREFIGHTERS' ROLE IN INMATE CARE, TRANSPORTATION PROMPTS INQUIRY
ByStephen Baxter
Firefighters who treat injured inmates at Santa Clara County Jail and drive them to the hospital are faced with "hazardous" conditions in the jail, and their daily calls to the lockup are drawing service away from neighborhoods, a San Jose council member contends.
Councilman Pierluigi Oliverio is asking for a review of jail and San Jose Fire Department rules when firefighters are called to the jail for service, and fire chief Darryl Von Raesfeld met with officials from the Santa Clara County Department of Correction on April 10 to begin tackling the issue.
"We have some preliminary information, but it will take a while to put the pieces together," Von Raesfeld said.
When an inmate at Santa Clara County's Main Jail on Hedding Street suffers an injury after which he cannot be moved, medical staff calls 911. An ambulance and paramedics may show up, but typically a team of four city firefighters is escorted by a guard through several rooms in the jail, where doors are locked behind them and their radios and cell phones cut out. Firefighters have said that as they enter each new room through windowless doors, inmates are often unsecured and potentially could attack them or take them hostage.
As they step into each room, the guard has to put inmates in a cell, handcuff them to a fixed object or otherwise secure
them. The procedure slows the response time to the injured person and puts the firefighters in unnecessary danger, firefighters said.
Some firefighters who have responded to the jail as often as three times a day have complained about conditions at the jail for at least eight years, but their concerns have been met mainly with indifference or retaliation from some fellow firefighters, county officials and San Jose leaders.
"It's a firefighter safety issue," said Denelle Fedor, director of public policy for Councilman Oliverio. Firefighters usually are summoned from Stations 7 and 1, which serve the Rose Garden neighborhood and downtown, and fewer staff there means fewer residents can be helped with blood tests and other non-emergency services.
It could also compromise the time to get to a fire.
"The people in the neighborhoods are the ones paying taxes. If the firefighter is going to the jail more often than [he] is in the neighborhood ... then that's taking service away from the neighborhood," Fedor said.
Von Raesfeld said Stations 1 and 7 have responded to 400 calls to the jail in the last 21 months, which is fewer than once a day. However, firefighters who care for inmates and drive them to Santa Clara Valley Medical Center have said they have had three calls in a day.
"It's not he busiest place we respond to, but that's one of the areas of review: Are they legitimate calls?" Von Raesfeld asked.
Santa Clara County Department of Correction spokesman Mark Cursi said there are nurses and other medical staff at the jail to care for minor injuries; dialing 911 "depends on the circumstance," he said.
Another main question of the inquiry is whether a "sally port," or detention area at a bottom floor jail entrance, is used so that outside medical aides can meet inmates there rather than winding through unsecured jail areas.
With spinal injuries and other serious mishaps, patients cannot be moved. But for other injuries, the inmate could be brought to a detention area on the first floor.
A room or rooms in Main Jail North and Main Jail South have been used as sally ports, fire and jail authorities said, but it is unclear how often and under what circumstances they are used.
According to Oliverio's statement, "The jail is unlike any other setting the SJFD responds to and has the following hazardous conditions: a known population of suspected and convicted felons; a history of staffing shortages for security and safety personnel; a 'no hostage' policy; locked gates/doors that firefighters have no control over and are unable to exit if need be; communication 'dead zones' for both portable radios and cell phones; and currently no agreement on the level of medical care provided by the jail ... I want to make sure that current policies in place are being adhered to by all agencies when the San Jose Fire Department responds to the Santa Clara County Jail."
The fire department agreed to a new policy in 2004 that said firefighters who felt unsafe entering unsecured areas could leave at any time. However, firefighters have said that automatically locking doors and uncertainty of unsecured inmates makes leaving next to impossible.
Cursi, spokesman for the Department of Correction, said guards have procedures for securing inmates, but he declined to elaborate.
Oliverio is expected to formally ask for an inquiry at an April 17 meeting of the city's Public Safety, Finance and Strategic Support Committee, and county and city fire officials are expected to present a formal response in May or June.
