It is becoming increasingly common for police chiefs and law enforcement officers to take on leadership roles within emergency management. A greater number of police chiefs and those with long law enforcement careers find themselves uniquely qualified to head emergency management programs. However, this is a relatively new phenomenon in public safety.

“Very traditionally, emergency management was actually something relegated to either civil defense departments or handled by the fire service because it had more of a rescue type of component,” said Dennis Alvarez, an Emergency & Disaster Management (EDM) professor at American Military University, who was a deputy sheriff for five years. “There wasn’t really a law enforcement component to it, and we didn’t start seeing that transition until the country started having more terrorist events. I think that’s when law enforcement saw that emergency management was an integral component to managing an incident.”¹