I loved the old fire service.

I want to say that clearly before anything else in this article, because what follows could easily be read as an attack on a system I benefited from, was shaped by, and in many ways still deeply respect. It is not that. It is something harder to write and I hope more useful to read — an honest conversation from someone on the inside about whether the system we built for a different era of this job is still selecting for what the job actually requires and appropriate fire service hiring decisions culture for the evolving times.

I came up through a fire service that was in many ways forged by the post-Vietnam military culture that flowed into departments across the country through the 1970s, 1980s, and into the 1990s. The structure was clear. Seniority mattered above almost everything else. You kept your mouth shut and your ears open. The captain and the chief knew best. There was a right way and a wrong way, and the right way was the way it had always been done. You did not question that. You earned your place by proving you could conform to it.

I am not here to tell you that system was wrong. For what the job was at the time, for the era it came from, for the people who built it — it made a certain kind of sense. It produced cohesive teams, clear chains of command, and people who could operate under pressure in chaotic environments without needing to stop and discuss their feelings about it.

What it was not designed to do was serve the community that had evolved around it. And that is where the honest conversation has to begin.

What the Old Mold Was Actually Optimizing For

The fire service of that era was focused primarily — sometimes almost exclusively — on fire. EMS was coming in, hazmat was emerging in some departments, technical rescue in fewer, and Community Risk Reduction was not yet a serious concept for most organizations. Fire prevention existed but it was largely separate from operations. America Burning had been published, the warnings were there, but the operational culture of most departments was built around one central question: how do we respond when a fire occurs?

That question shaped everything. It shaped the training. It shaped the culture. It shaped who got hired and who did not.

The person who fit the mold was physically capable, team-oriented in a specific way — meaning they conformed, they did not disrupt, they fit in with the existing crew — and they shared a certain identity with the people already there. Athletic background. Military background in many cases. A personality that could operate within a rigid hierarchy without friction.

I fit that mold in some ways. In others I did not. I did not drink, which meant I skipped a lot of the social functions that were, functionally, where belonging was established. I had already had a career. I was married. I was more interested in advancing quickly than in waiting my turn. None of those things made me popular in certain circles early on.

But I understood the mold. I respected the people who built it. And I genuinely loved what it produced at its best — the cohesion, the efficiency, the pride, the culture of people who showed up for each other under extraordinarily difficult circumstances.

Loving something does not require pretending it has no limits.

The Job Changed. The Mold Did Not Keep Pace.

EMS is a useful place to start because it illustrates the pattern clearly.

For most departments today, emergency medical response is the majority of what crews do on every shift. This is not new information. The transition has been underway for decades. And yet the cultural resistance to it — the grumbling about low-acuity calls being beneath the department, the sense that someone else should be handling the mundane work while we wait for the exciting stuff — persists in ways that reveal something important about the gap between what the job is and what the culture thinks the job should be.

We grumble about EMS calls. I get it. I have been there. When you trained for fires, when the identity of the department is built around fires, when the equipment and the tradition and the mythology are all oriented toward fires — a lift assist at three in the morning does not feel like the job you signed up for.

But it is the job. And the person who can do that job with genuine care, with consistent professionalism, with the same engagement on the fifteenth low-acuity call of the week as on the first — that person is not being selected for by a hiring process built around physical fitness and conformity to a firefighting culture.

The community piece runs even deeper. The fire service has historically been very good at deciding what the community needs from us. We are less practiced at asking the community what it actually needs and building our response around the honest answer. The exciting parts of the job — the fires, the rescues, the high-stakes calls — are the parts we train for, the parts we talk about, the parts that define how we see ourselves. The prevention work, the community engagement, the unglamorous daily accumulation of risk intelligence that makes a difference over years rather than minutes — these are often treated as things someone else should be doing.

The hiring criteria that produces excellent fire suppressors does not automatically produce people who want to knock on doors in neighborhoods where the department has historically not been welcomed, who can build trust with community members who have every reason to be skeptical, who see the work of prevention as genuinely meaningful rather than as an imposition on their real job.

We like people like us. We find them easier to work with, easier to trust, easier to bring into the fold. That is a human pattern, not a fire service one — but the fire service has been unusually good at institutionalizing it.

The Bias We Will Not Fully Acknowledge

Here is the hardest part of this article to write, and I am going to write it anyway because I think it is the most important part.

We want to believe we are fair. We want to believe we give everyone a genuine shot, that we evaluate candidates on merit, that the best person gets the job and then gets a real opportunity to prove themselves. Most of the people making these decisions genuinely believe this about themselves.

And it is not fully true.

Not because fire service hiring decision makers are bad people or because the bias is intentional or malicious. But because bias does not require intention to operate. We are drawn to people who remind us of ourselves. We interpret unfamiliar communication styles, unfamiliar backgrounds, unfamiliar ways of approaching problems as deficits rather than differences. We mistake comfort with competence. We mistake familiarity with fit.

The fire service of the 1970s, 1980s, and into the 1990s was in many departments a closed system — not always by formal policy, but by culture, by social network, by the informal mechanisms through which information about job openings was shared, by who got the encouragement to apply and who did not, by what the people on the oral board panel were looking for when a candidate sat across from them. I am not saying anyone was actively trying to exclude. I am saying the system was not designed to include broadly, and the absence of intentional exclusion is not the same as the presence of genuine opportunity.

Laws exist. Legal standards govern hiring, probation, and promotion processes, and departments that allow those processes to be shaped by bias — even unconscious bias, even informal cultural pressure — face real legal exposure. The fact that something was done a certain way for decades is not a legal defense and has not been for a long time. The risk is real, it is not theoretical, and departments that have not seriously examined whether their processes can withstand legal scrutiny are carrying exposure they may not fully understand.

The Firehouse Is the Real Filter

Here is what I think is the most underappreciated dynamic in this entire conversation, and it is the one I want to make sure lands clearly.

The hiring process is the door. But the firehouse is the real filter.

A candidate can survive every stage of a reformed, thoughtful, legally sound hiring process and still be quietly selected out during probation — not by any formal mechanism, but by the accumulated weight of a crew that has decided, consciously or not, that this person is not one of us.

If a new firefighter is not genuinely accepted at the crew level, several things become almost impossible. Passing probation becomes significantly harder when the feedback is not honest, when the training is not fully given, when the informal knowledge that flows naturally to a welcomed member is withheld — again, not necessarily deliberately, but because belonging is the prerequisite for that kind of organic transfer.

The appropriate feedback that would help a developing firefighter improve does not flow to someone the crew has decided does not belong. The informal mentorship — the kitchen table conversations that carry institutional knowledge from one generation to the next — does not reach someone who is tolerated rather than welcomed.

And the idea that someone who survives all of this might eventually have enough standing to make a difference, to influence culture, to contribute the skills and perspectives the department actually needs? That is an enormous ask from someone who spent their probationary year working twice as hard as their peers for half the recognition.

I am not describing a conspiracy. I am describing a human social pattern that is particularly powerful in high-cohesion, high-stakes environments like firehouses — where trust genuinely matters, where the stakes of crew dysfunction are real, and where the instinct to protect the existing culture feels like it is serving a legitimate purpose even when it is not.

I want to share something personal here because I think it illustrates this more honestly than any abstract argument can.

One of my closest friends now was hired at the same department about a month after me in 2001. He is Mexican-American, born and raised in East Los Angeles. He showed up to his first station in a mini truck on airbags. Imagine those airbags loudly deflating so the truck can sit on the ground at 6:30 in the morning right outside the dorm. Bald head. ESL. Dodgers fan. Raiders fan. Last name tattooed across his back in “gang writting.” Every cultural marker that in Orange County at that time — one of the most politically conservative counties in the country, a place that surrounding communities literally called “the Orange Curtain” when they crossed into it — carried a specific and unflattering set of associations in the minds of people shaped by that environment. An important distinction here is that the actual community he was hired to serve, even at that time, was over 50% hispanic. Perception does not always equal reality.

The first impressions were what you would expect given all of that.

What happened next was not.

He thrived. He won people over. He became one of the most genuinely beloved people that department has ever had. Not by erasing who he was but by being so completely and authentically himself — with the personality, the humor, the warmth, the competence — that the stereotypes simply could not survive contact with the actual person.

I tell this story with tremendous respect for him and genuine affection. And I also tell it with honesty about what it means.

He should not have had to be exceptional to be treated fairly. The fact that his personality and demeanor overcame every bias that was almost certainly running in the background when he pulled into that station — that is a testament to him as a person. It is not a testament to the system.

For every person with his gifts who navigates that environment and wins — how many others with equal capability did not make it because they landed at a different station, or encountered a crew that was less open, or simply did not have that specific combination of personality and resilience that allowed him to change minds so quickly?

The system should not require people to be exceptional just to receive a genuine opportunity. That is what fairness actually means.

Who Gets to Decide What Fit Means

The people making hiring decisions in most departments came up through the system as it was. They were shaped by the culture that existed when they were hired, when they went through probation, when they were welcomed into the firehouse or had to earn their way in. Their understanding of what a good firefighter looks like is grounded in their own experience of what a good firefighter looked like.

That is not wrong. Experience is valuable. But it has a specific and significant blind spot.

If your mental model of an excellent firefighter was formed in an era when the job was primarily fire suppression, when the crew was demographically uniform, when the cultural expectations were set by a military-influenced hierarchical structure — that mental model is going to systematically undervalue skills and attributes the job now genuinely requires.

Communication across difference. Genuine empathy in EMS response. Cultural competency in communities that have complicated relationships with public safety institutions. Prevention thinking. The ability to engage a city council member or a skeptical community resident as effectively as a structure fire.

None of these skills are visible in a physical agility test. Not all of them show up clearly in an oral board evaluation being scored by people who were hired for different reasons.

The question is not whether the people making hiring decisions are good people or whether they care about the department. Most of them are and most of them do.

The question is whether the model in their heads — the mental picture of what they are looking for — was formed for the job as it was or the job as it is.

What This Is Not

I want to be clear about what I am not arguing.

I am not arguing that physical fitness should be deemphasized. The fire service is genuinely physically demanding, genuinely dangerous, and the ability to perform under those conditions is not optional. That standard should not move as long as it is based in the realities of the job.

I am not arguing that the values of the old fire service — the team cohesion, the commitment to each other, the pride in craft, the willingness to run toward what everyone else runs from — should be discarded. Those values are worth protecting. They are among the things I love most about this profession.

I am not arguing that every department is the same or that every hiring panel is operating with unchecked bias. I know departments that are doing this well and have been for years.

I am arguing that the fire service as a whole has not yet fully reckoned with the gap between the person the old hiring model was designed to find and the person the modern fire service actually needs. And I am arguing that the firehouse — not the oral board, not the civil service process, not the chief’s office — is where the real reckoning happens, and where the most important changes need to take root.

The Hardest Question

If the crew in the firehouse does not accept someone, that person’s career in that department is going to be extraordinarily difficult. Not impossible. But difficult in ways that most people making hiring decisions do not fully account for when they congratulate themselves on a reformed process.

The question that matters most is not just who we hire. It is what kind of culture we have built that new hires are walking into. And whether the people already in that culture understand — genuinely, not performatively — why what the job requires now is different from what it required when they came through, and why that difference matters for the communities they serve.

The old mold was built by people who cared deeply about the fire service and wanted to protect something that had genuine value. I respect that. I was shaped by it. I benefited from it.

But the community the fire service exists to serve has changed. The risks that community faces have changed. The skills required to address those risks have changed.

The mold has to change with them.

Not because a law requires it — though laws do require it. Not because it is the politically correct thing to do — that framing has never changed a single firehouse culture and never will.

Because the community is depending on us to show up with what they actually need. And whether we do that — fully, honestly, effectively — starts with who we decide belongs in the firehouse.

And who we decide gets to make that decision.

Brent Faulkner, MAM, FO, is the CEO and Founder of Virtual CRR Inc.
A retired Battalion Chief from Anaheim Fire & Rescue, Brent brings 28 years of fire service experience, including leadership in structure fires, wildland operations, hazardous materials response, EMS incidents, and specialized rescue operations. He also served 17 years on a Type 1 Hazardous Materials Response Team.

A defining moment in Brent’s career came while leading Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) efforts at a DHS-recognized Terrorism Fusion Center. There, he oversaw initiatives to safeguard critical infrastructure from terrorism, natural disasters, and emerging threats — an experience that shaped his passion for Community Risk Reduction and ultimately led to the creation of Virtual CRR.

Brent holds a Master’s Degree in Management, a Bachelor’s in Occupational Studies, and Associate Degrees in Hazardous Materials Response and Fire Science.