Firebirds Build New Nest In Hamden

Two ​“Firebirds” who pressed the fight for racial justice in New Haven’s fire department have set their sights across municipal lines — in hopes of using their lived experience to help Hamden’s department reflect the increasingly diverse town it serves.

The two veteran New Haven firefighters — Gary Tinney and current firefighter Samod Rankins — were nominated for spots on Hamden’s Fire Commission last week.

Tinney, who retired from the NHFD after more than 20 years on the job, has served as a mentor and leader for firefighters locally and across the country and locally. He is a past president of the Firebirds Society, an organization founded 50 years ago to unite Black and Hispanic firefighters. He is the current executive vice-president of the International Association of Black Firefighters.

One of his closest mentees is Rankins, a 30-year-old who became a firefighter, joined the Firebirds, and has since led the charge in bringing more New Haven natives and minorities into the department. He said Tinney pressed him to start volunteering back in high school. He is currently out on leave after suffering near-fatal injuries in a Valley Street fire last year that killed his partner.

Tinney and Rankins grew up in New Haven and since moved to Hamden. The town’s 86 percent non-Hispanic white, entirely male Fire Department is a new challenge that the two plan to take if approved to serve on the Fire Commission The Legislative Council is scheduled to take a full and final vote on their appointments later this month.

The Fire Commission hires and promotes firefighters from a pool of applicants put together by the town’s Civil Service Commission. It acts as advisors to the department and administration. If confirmed, Tinney and Rankins will be in a position to help diversify Hamden’s fire ranks as well as to push for policies and programs connected to mental health, community relations, and risk education, areas in which Tinney has experience in New Haven.

In an interview with the Independent, Tinney and Rankins discussed how those latter goals — like promoting mental wellness and more meaningful public outreach — can be achieved by looking at a root problem in the firefighting community: A lack of diversity and predominating atmosphere of machismo.

Firefighting is often associated with straightforward survival. Tinney and Rankin argued that the public service-oriented field offers a unique entry point to building thriving communities.

“It’s been a battle,” Tinney said of his experiences working towards a more open and accessible department in New Haven and nationwide. In New Haven he led fights to promote more people of color and helped create a high school program to prepare city residents for firefighting careers. ​“In the Hamden department alone right now there aren’t any female firefighters. That doesn’t sit well with me at all.”

“If you see that you’re not tapping into certain groups of people, you have a problem,” Tinney said. ​“By us being on the commission, we can bring in people to help rectify the problem.”

“Mayor [Lauren] Garrett is looking for a lot of positive change,” Rankins added. ​“Training, education, diversity — I feel that we can accomplish those goals.”

Fighting For Family

“Gary is the reason I wanted to be a fireman,” Rankins told the Independent. While a student at Eli Whitney Technical High School, Rankins aspired to a career in politics. Tinney, a family friend, kept pushing him to try out firefighting instead. While volunteering, ​“I fell in love with the job,” Rankins said. 

“I love the brotherhood and sisterhood of it. I love the community service.”

Rankins is a prime example of the kind of firefighter Tinney has fought for decades to bring into New Haven’s — and soon Hamden’s — departments. Tinney said the goal is not just recruiting people who will brave dangerous conditions, but finding community minded people who enjoy leading toy drives or brainstorming strategies to support people experiencing homelessness.

“People don’t realize that being a firefighter is not just being a person who’s out there extinguishing fires. You become a community person — that go-to person,” Tinney reflected, pointing to the wide variety of calls and requests that firefighters respond to.

Tinney recalled responding to a medical call years back because an 8‑year-old child had stepped on a nail. When he arrived, Tinney said he realized that the kid’s ​“sneakers were worn through. He didn’t want to go to the hospital because of the bill.”

While firefighters worked to treat the child, Tinney and some others ​“went to a shoe store and bought him sneakers.”

Behind Firehouse Doors

“It’s not just a Black and white thing,” Tinney stretched. ​“Culturally, you learn from each other. Then when you respond to calls, and it’s different people from different cultures, you better know how to communicate with everybody. That’s something that has to be learned, especially if you were raised in predominantly Black and white neighborhoods.”

The required proximity of those who work in firefighting — and the fact that the vast majority of those drawn to the field are white — means that racial prejudices are regularly revealed. 

That culture further repels nonwhite and/or nonmales from joining fire departments, Tinney said. Bringing individuals with different life experiences into a space where they must learn to live and work together full-time offers an opportunity to examine the nuances of systemic racism and toxic masculinity.

“When the first black firefighter was hired in New York, wherever that Black firefighter slept, no one else would sleep there,” Tinney noted. ​“This stuff is deep.”

In the past, Tinney has led the charge in addressing behaviors that read as violent, like a white firefighter using the n‑word on social media or another colleague placing Confederate symbols around the firehouse. 

That climate made living in the firehouse feel like running through five-alarm fires and making it out alive. Sometimes, the easiest response was accept that there are certain people Tinney or Rankins couldn’t get along with. 

But Tinney also said that disengagement from hard conversations is ​“one of our Achilles heels — we know it’s there, but we ignore it. The racial epithets come out, and we need to have a more proactive approach.”

Overall, Tinney said, firefighting should be an opportunity to provide people, especially from ommunities of color, with strong employment opportunities that include ​“medical insurance, a good pension, all these different things that are phenomenal.” 

Rankins and Tinney pointed to unstable mental health as a symptom of perpetual expectations that firefighters should be unbreakable and fearless.

“I feel that most people don’t know what mental health is until it knocks on your front door,” Rankins said. After surviving a fire with tragic outcomes last year, Rankins said, he woke up from a medically induced coma with ​“no blueprint on how to navigate my mental health.”

“You’ve got a guide and a manual on how to do everything else,” he said. But there’s no discussion about how to cope with the harsher realities of the job.

What happened to Rankins was extreme. But Tinney, who was ​“thrown for a loop” when he heard what had happened to his chosen ​“grandson,” began to reckon more deeply with the fact that those who witness and deal with death, destruction, prejudice and psychological pain on a daily basis have little built-in support. 

“People pay attention to physical injury,” he said, ​“But they don’t recognize that suicide is number one.”

Many firefighters, Tinney said, are involved in ​“domestic issues, with drinking and drugs … People are put on administrative leave, and then they’re home, depressed, and embarrassed while thinking they’re supposed to be tough.”

Drafting A Blueprint

While Rankins was hospitalized, Tinney launched a partnership with local mental health servicer Clifford Beers.

Now, once a month, dozens of New Haven firefighters come together to practice discussing the hardships of their shared career in a shared space.

‘I’ve learned a lot,” Rankins said about his own mental health over the past year. ​“And I’m willing to share with a lot of new firefighters how important mental health is and how to prevent things from getting worse.”

That more recent method of confrontation with an issue that every firefighter on the force fights with — what Tinney calls ​“the fire within” — represents the ways in which Tinney and Rankins hope to begin breaking barriers in Hamden.

The two Hamden residents noted that they already know many of the town’s firefighters. They said they want to use their own personal experiences as a means of entering conversations and beginning dialogues within Hamden’s department in order to openly address climate concerns. 

Next steps include going into schools,as New Haven’s Public Safety Academy does within Hillhouse High School, to draw more locals, kids of color, and non-boys into the dream of public service.

Hamden Fire Chief Gary Merwede said he is ​“looking forward to working with the new Fire Commission … to hearing new perspectives and engaging in thoughtful conversation.”

Merwede took on the role of chief three years ago. ​“I started planning right away,” he said, to get a more diverse crew of people into the ranks. ​“It’s not particular to Hamden; it’s a statewide phenomenon.”

Merwede pointed out that the national pool of people who hold EMT or paramedic certification is roughly 80 percent white, and that personnel and civil services first draw from that national puddle of candidates when job positions open up. The Fire Commission members are the last group to OK those pre-qualified candidates before they’re officially ushered into the department.

An example of one project Merwede has launched is a scholarship for Hamden high schoolers to get their EMT certification for free from Yale. The first year, the fire department paid for one student of color to get certified. Now the Civil Service Commission and the mayor’s office have provided funds to send two additional students of color through the same schooling.

Hamden has 15 open spots of varying degrees of leadership in the department to fill following a wave of retirements last fall. 

Though Merwede won’t play a direct role in filling those positions, Tinney is ready with candidates he plans to push into the pool.

“The idea that you can’t find qualified applicants — that’s a farce,” he said. ​“I know several female firefighters that have the certifications we can tap into.”

In addition to overseeing and studying Hamden’s hiring process as soon as the end of this month, Tinney and Rankins are looking to use their new positions to fight for bigger changes down the line. Rankins, who successfully filed a lawsuit last year to challenge how New Haven civil services randomly selected departmental applicants, said he would be is interested in changing entry-level recruitment requirements to allow more people access the general application process.

In the immediate future, the duo will begin by bringing their brotherhood — or ​“grandfather, grandson”-ship, as Tinney describes their 60-something/30-something intergenerational dynamic — to the five-person volunteer board.

Though monthly commission meetings may not be as familial as dining with one’s live-in coworkers most nights, Tinney said he and Rankins are confident they’ll have ​“a lot to bring to the table.”