The previous article in this series asked a direct question: is your Community Risk Assessment actually telling you the truth?

The answer to that question depends largely on this one: who was involved in producing it?

A CRA is only as strong as the perspectives, data, and expertise that shaped it. When the CRA process is too narrow — relying on a single person, a single division, or a single data source — the result reflects that narrowness. It may be accurate within its boundaries while remaining blind to everything outside them.

Building a CRA that genuinely captures community risk requires a deliberate, broad-based approach to who is in the room, who is being asked, and whose data is being used. This article offers a practical framework for departments thinking through that process.

Start With Internal Representation — All of It

The first instinct in many departments is to assign the CRA to a single individual or a small group. That is a reasonable starting point, but it is not a sufficient one.

A CRA that reflects only the prevention bureau’s perspective will inevitably skew toward the risks prevention staff are most familiar with — which may not be the same risks that operations, EMS, or other groups encounter daily. Every functional area of the department touches community risk differently, and a complete CRA needs to draw from all of them.

Internal representation should include voices from across the organization. Company officers and line personnel bring ground-level observations that leadership often never formally hears. They are in homes, businesses, and neighborhoods every shift. They notice the recurring hazards, the changing demographics, the repeat addresses, and the conditions that never quite rise to the level of a formal report but accumulate into meaningful patterns over time.

Battalion chiefs and division supervisors bring operational context — an understanding of how risk is distributed geographically, where response challenges exist, and where the gaps between community need and department capacity are most pronounced.

EMS personnel are among the most valuable and most underutilized voices in the CRA process. As discussed in a previous article in this series, EMS often represents sixty to eighty percent of a department’s call volume. The patterns they observe — repeat medical calls, fall risks, medication mismanagement, behavioral health trends — are risk data. They belong in the CRA.

Fire inspectors and fire prevention staff bring code compliance perspective and knowledge of the built environment. They understand which occupancies have been chronically non-compliant, which areas have aging infrastructure, and where inspection resources have historically been stretched too thin.

Training officers understand competency gaps and emerging hazard types that the department may not yet be fully prepared to address.

Administrative staff who manage data systems often know more about the quality, completeness, and limitations of the department’s data than anyone else in the organization. Their involvement in the CRA process is frequently overlooked and almost always valuable.

The point is not to create an unwieldy committee. It is to ensure that no significant internal perspective is systematically excluded from a process that is supposed to represent the full scope of community risk.

Broaden the Circle: External Stakeholders and Community Partners

If internal representation is the foundation of a strong CRA, external stakeholder engagement is what transforms it from a fire department document into a genuine community risk assessment.

Risk does not respect jurisdictional boundaries, and neither should the CRA process. The following groups represent some of the most important external voices departments should be actively engaging.

Hospitals and healthcare systems see the downstream consequences of community risk more clearly than almost any other institution. They track fall admissions, readmissions, medication complications, behavioral health crises, and injury patterns in ways that fire departments rarely have access to on their own. A conversation with a hospital community health liaison or data analyst can surface risk trends that would otherwise remain invisible to the fire service.

Public health departments hold population-level data on chronic disease, injury rates, environmental hazards, and demographic vulnerability that is directly relevant to CRR planning. Many public health agencies are actively looking for community partners and are receptive to collaborative data sharing when approached thoughtfully.

Law enforcement agencies observe community risk from a different angle — domestic situations, mental health crises, substance use trends, and neighborhood-level instability all create conditions that increase fire and injury risk. Their perspective adds context that purely incident-based fire data cannot provide.

Emergency management offices are another critical partner. They typically maintain hazard vulnerability assessments and risk mapping resources that can significantly complement a fire department’s CRA process.

Schools and educational institutions have direct relationships with families and youth populations. They observe food insecurity, housing instability, and other social determinants of risk that rarely surface in fire incident data.

Social services agencies — including those serving seniors, individuals experiencing homelessness, domestic violence survivors, and people with disabilities — work directly with populations that consistently face elevated fire and injury risk. Their knowledge of these communities is often deeper and more nuanced than any data set can capture.

Utilities, including electric, gas, and water providers, hold information relevant to infrastructure risk, outage patterns, and areas with aging systems that may increase hazard exposure.

Community and neighborhood organizations, faith communities, and culturally specific advocacy groups provide access to populations that may be underrepresented in formal data and may have legitimate reasons for limited engagement with government agencies. Their participation in the CRA process is not just valuable — it is often essential for identifying hidden risk in populations the department is not otherwise reaching.

Business associations and chambers of commerce can provide perspective on commercial risk, business continuity concerns, and economic vulnerabilities that affect how communities recover from fire and other emergencies.

Communities that experience significant population fluctuations present a unique challenge in the CRA process. Jurisdictions that host tourism destinations, major sporting events, seasonal industries, or high-volume travel corridors can see their population — and their risk profile — shift dramatically depending on the time of year or week. A CRA built on permanent resident data alone may significantly underrepresent the risk that exists during peak periods.

Departments in these communities should deliberately seek data and perspective from sources that understand transient population dynamics. Convention and visitors bureaus, tourism boards, and chambers of commerce can provide attendance data, seasonal trend information, and insight into where visitors concentrate and when. Hotel and hospitality associations understand occupancy patterns and can speak to the fire and life safety realities of high-density temporary lodging. Stadium and arena operators, event management companies, and venue operators hold data on crowd sizes, event frequency, and the specific risk conditions that large gatherings create. Transportation hubs including airports, bus terminals, and train stations can provide passenger volume data that helps departments understand movement patterns during peak periods.

Seasonal industries such as agriculture, ski resorts, and beach communities often bring temporary workforces that live in employer-provided housing or informal arrangements that carry their own distinct risk profile. Reaching out to major seasonal employers, labor organizations, and agricultural associations can surface risk conditions that permanent resident data will never reveal.

The CRA process in these communities must account for who is present during the highest-risk periods — not just who lives there year-round. Failure to do so can result in prevention programs that are well-designed for the permanent population while leaving the most crowded and potentially most hazardous conditions entirely unaddressed.

Subject Matter Experts and Specialized Knowledge

Beyond organizational stakeholders, a strong CRA process should identify and engage subject matter experts whose knowledge fills specific gaps.

Depending on the community’s risk profile, this might include wildland fire specialists, structural engineers, public health researchers, behavioral health professionals, data analysts, or specialists in specific hazard types such as lithium-ion battery risks, hazardous materials, or high-rise fire behavior.

The goal is not to engage every possible expert but to honestly identify where the department’s internal knowledge has limits and seek qualified perspectives to fill those gaps.

Data Sources: Casting a Wide Net

A CRA is built on data, and the quality of the CRA is directly tied to the breadth and quality of the data informing it. Departments should be deliberate about identifying every relevant data source — internal and external — rather than defaulting to the sources they already know how to access.

Internal data sources typically include incident reports, EMS call data, inspection records, pre-incident plans, response time data, and geographic information. These are essential starting points but rarely tell the complete story on their own.

External data sources that are frequently underutilized include census and demographic data, property and land use records, insurance industry loss data, hospital admission statistics, public health surveillance data, school enrollment and poverty indicators, and regional hazard assessments from emergency management agencies.

Community-level data collected through structured assessments is an increasingly important input to the CRA process. Virtual CRR home safety assessments, for example, generate standardized data on residential risk factors — smoke alarm presence, fall hazards, electrical concerns, heating risks, and more — directly from households across the community. When aggregated, this data reveals geographic patterns, population-specific vulnerabilities, and risk concentrations that incident data alone cannot surface. Departments using Virtual CRR assessments have access to a data set that can be integrated directly into the CRA process alongside traditional sources, filling gaps that would otherwise require significant in-person assessment resources to address.

The principle is straightforward: the more complete the data picture, the more accurate the risk portrait — and the more defensible the priorities that emerge from it.

The Internal and External Balance in Writing and Validation

As discussed in the previous article, the question of who conducts and writes the CRA deserves careful thought. The same logic that applies to data collection applies here.

Internal staff bring irreplaceable institutional knowledge, community context, and organizational ownership of the findings. A CRA written entirely by external consultants without meaningful internal involvement often produces conclusions that feel disconnected from operational reality — and recommendations that never get implemented because no one inside the organization feels invested in them.

At the same time, internal staff working without external perspective risk producing a CRA that reflects organizational assumptions more than community reality. The same biases that shape daily operations will shape the assessment if no outside check exists.

A high-quality outside firm brings methodological rigor, cross-jurisdictional perspective, and the objectivity that comes from having no stake in protecting existing programs or avoiding uncomfortable conclusions. Critically, a good outside firm will also validate findings — stress-testing internal conclusions against external data and challenging interpretations that may reflect assumption rather than evidence.

The strongest process combines both. Internal staff drive data collection, stakeholder relationships, and organizational context. External expertise provides structure, objectivity, and validation. Neither replaces the other, and departments should be cautious about any approach — whether fully internal or fully outsourced — that eliminates one side of that equation entirely.

When evaluating an outside firm, departments should ask direct questions: How will you engage our internal staff? What community stakeholders will you interview and how? What data sources beyond our incident reports will you draw from? How will you challenge findings that are inconsistent with what our data shows? The answers reveal quickly whether a firm is prepared to produce a genuine community risk assessment or a polished document that tells you what you already know.

The CRA Is a Community Process

Perhaps the most important reframe in thinking about who should be involved in the CRA is this: the Community Risk Assessment is not a fire department project that happens to involve the community. It is a community process that the fire department leads.

That distinction changes how the process is designed, who is invited to participate, and how findings are ultimately used. A CRA built through genuine community engagement produces findings that are more accurate, priorities that are more defensible, and programs that are more likely to reach the people who need them most.

The fire department’s role is to lead that process — with discipline, with humility, and with a commitment to hearing perspectives that may be uncomfortable and incorporating data that may challenge existing assumptions.

That is what separates a community risk assessment from a fire department report with a different name.

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.