In East Grand Rapids, the cop and the firefighter are the same person

Call 911 in East Grand Rapids and the person who shows up might write you a ticket, put out your kitchen fire, or start CPR — and they’re trained to do all three. The little three-square-mile city on the east shore of Reeds Lake runs one of the country’s roughly one hundred true public-safety departments, where there is no separate police force and fire department. There’s just one department, and every sworn officer wears all the hats.

The city pulled this off in the mid-1980s, when both its police and fire chiefs were nearing retirement and the city commission decided to fold the two services into one. It was not a smooth ride. Cross-training the whole staff took two years. Cops were sent to fire school; firefighters went through the police academy; everybody added medical first-responder training on top. Plenty of them, by the city’s own account, went kicking and screaming. People who’d spent careers as one thing did not love being told to become two more.

The logic was money and coverage. A small, well-off city of about 11,000 doesn’t generate enough fires to keep a full crew of firefighters busy, or enough crime to justify a big standalone police roster. Combine them, and the same officers patrol the streets all shift — then drop everything and roll a fire truck when the alarm comes in. Fewer people, broader coverage, on a small-town budget.

The model is rare enough that other towns send people to East Grand Rapids to study how it’s done. The next time an officer waves you through a stop sign near Gaslight Village, it’s worth a thought: that same person may have been on the nozzle of a fire hose the week before.