684: Burn It Down
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A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbpeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. Okay, so let's start here. This is a training video for firefighters in Amsterdam. Three firemen in an office, drinking coffee, catching up, and then one of them, this big bald guy, gets up to show the other's this new helmet that he's just gotten, picks up a box off the floor, says what is that? She makes a face. It stinks, too. Smells his fingers. What is that? It's P. This conversation understandably turns to speculation on how the P might have gotten there. Where did you find this, he asks? The depot. Do you think it was a cat? It was not a cat. The rest of the video, which is entitled The Incident with the Helmet, goes on for a few minutes explaining why it is not a good idea to pee in your colleague's helmet. Even if it's a joke, like that can make people feel bad and unwelcome. And the reason the fire department needed a video like this was that firefighters were peeing in their co-workers' helmets and their drinks and had been for years. This was a reenactment of an actual incident. Amsterdam firefighters had a kind of macho, frat house sort of culture. And for women who came to work there or anybody who wasn't white, it was rough in all kinds of ways. Pranks, bullying, racist jokes, sexist comments. Women describe the environment as alienating. One Moroccan Dutch firefighter said, "What we want is not super special. We just want normal behavior, normal treatment of people." The bosses had problems with them, too. The firefighters would simply ignore certain orders to change the way they worked. Back in 2011, the mayor of Amsterdam commanded them to do some straightforward things, like perform more home inspections, pass out smoke detectors, switch from 24-hour shifts to 8-hour shifts. A year passed, and another, and another. After five years, still nothing. They pretty much blown off his request. The mayor didn't like to hear no. Paul Wilkes is a reporter at Amsterdam's biggest newspaper, Head Parole. He's covered the fire department for over 20 years. "He put his fist on the table and said, 'And now it's over. And now I'll send you a strong man.' He'll change the fire brigade in the way I wanted to change." The strong man the mayor brought in was a guy named Lane Schop. His firefighting experience before this? Nothing. He spent his whole career working at the Amsterdam Police Department. And he wasn't just an outsider, he was somebody with a reputation for being a real hard-ass. "I expected a riot, because the way they live in the fire stations, being all day and
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