Re: Townhall.com – 3/1/2009 – “Remember the Maginot – or, don’t shoot the dog” – Paul Jacobs

Jacobs is right on about the necessary of citizen robustness and quick citizen reaction in emergencies to support the efforts of a thin veneer of professionals. It is not possible to have a standing “army” of professionals ready to respond to any problem we can (and can’t) think of. The economic cost of such an “army” is too high, the between problem inactivity too demotivating to the “army”, and the lack of the responsibility for responding to crisis by the general population makes us unable to respond to unanticipated problems.

But Jacobs is wrong in his interpretation of the “Dead Pet Dog” parable. The problem was not due to “professional” responders; volunteer responders with or without professional leadership (posse or vigilante responders) have a long history of much greater overreaction and error rate in our country than our professional police forces. Volunteer responders led by professionals are preferable to purely professional responders not because volunteers do better (they don’t) but because when professionals cannot adequately respond to all problems, they need volunteer support for the things that they are insufficiently staffed to do. In the Dead Pet Dog incident, volunteers were not necessary and their presence would probably have made matters even worse.

Placing our trust is government is beneficial, so long as (1) we put our trust in government to do only what government should be doing, and (2) we insure thru the general practice of democracy that our government is competent at doing what it is supposed to do. There are limits to what government should do, and these limits reflect what volunteers cannot (or more to the point, do not) successfully do.

What FEMA was supposed to do during Katrina --- make federal resources available to local responders and provide coordination among local responder organizations, including local governments --- was right on. But what FEMA actually did do failed to justify our trust in their competency to do their job. We should continue to recognize government’s FEMA mandate but we should take steps to insure that FEMA is actually prepared to do its job. It is unfair and inaccurate to blame FEMA’s Katrina failure on anything other than that it’s managers being chosen by political and personal relationships instead of professional emergency response management competence, and as such neither understood what could/should have been done in preparation for a Katrina-like event, or (apparently) even what could/should have been done once a Katrina-like event occurred.