Robert Tucker clocks in one year as FDNY’s ‘CEO’

Robert Tucker is about to reach a year as the 35th commissioner of the Fire Department of New York. Tucker, 55, who also was a Queens County prosecutor under former District Attorney Richard Brown, took on the commissioner role with no experience as a firefighter. Instead, he dove in as a self-described FDNY fanboy. Now, he calls himself the department’s “CEO,” and he is especially focused on the paramedics who make up a quarter of the department’s 17,000-person workforce.

Tucker’s tenure follows the departure of Laura Kavanagh, the first woman to lead the department who attempted to diversify its ranks. Kavanagh resigned last year after a turbulent tenure challenged by internal lawsuits. Unlike Kavanagh, who joined the department in 2014, Tucker hadn’t previously worked for FDNY before becoming commissioner, but he sees his outsider status as an asset. Tucker previously led T&M Protection Resources, a private security firm. He also served on the board of several organizations including the Richard Tucker Music Foundation, named after his grandfather, an opera tenor and cantor. 

City & State caught up with him to discuss his transition from the private sector, how he embraced the culture of the department and what challenges he faced. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You've been fire commissioner for almost a year now. How was the transition from your previous job?

While I may not have ever held a hose or been an EMT or paramedic, I do come to this job with a lot of skills that I actually think matter more than people realize. There have been many great fire commissioners who came before me – I'm number 35, incidentally. You would be surprised to know that many of them did not come from the fire service, and that includes names like Howard Safir and Nick Scoppetta, and my predecessor, Laura Kavanagh. (Editor’s note: Kavanagh worked at FDNY for many years before becoming commissioner, but she was never a firefighter.) I do think there's a learning curve. You'd be naive to say otherwise. But I also think that I came to this job realizing that the fire chiefs and the EMS chiefs run this job, and everybody has lanes in which they belong.

Describe for me what a typical work day for you is like. 

This is a job where the unexpected, the unplanned for, happens a lot. There are things that I want to know about, every single morning. I wake up early and I try to get a workout in … And then I speak to my first deputy commissioner and the chief of the department … I’m an information guy. I want to know how our most sick and injured firefighters are doing. That's not something that flows directly to the fire commissioner all the time … Every Monday morning, we have a group call with the staff chiefs at 8:30, and … then (I arrive) here in the office.

Walking into the job, what challenges did you inherit and what goals did you set?

Look, it's not a state secret that when I arrived here, this place was suffering. And there are a lot of reasons for that. 

Are you hinting at the shake up in command and legal troubles that resulted under your predecessor? 

Yeah, I'm hinting at all of that. I think there was a trust problem between this office and the rest of the department. And I think that played out, unfortunately, very obviously, in the newspapers, all of them. And I wanted to immediately quiet that down. And I wanted to … show the confidence that they had a commissioner who had their back and who was going to have a wide-open door policy. There are still people who walk in this office, who say they've never been in this office. They've been here for 30 years. 

What has been your standout moment?

The FDNY is a really important part of the public safety mission in New York City, and never was that much more outstandingly shown than at (the recent mass shooting) at 345 Park Avenue.

Did you go to the scene? 

I responded to the scene very quickly. We have a firehouse on 51st and Lexington, right there. I'm not going to lie to you. I've been to a lot of fires, but I was moved differently by that shooting, by the drama of it. But also by the weight of the role that we played. When you're dragging a cop who it turns out is mortally wounded, throwing him in the back of an ambulance and racing him to a trauma center – that's pretty real. And those are our paramedics.

You rarely hear such observations of EMTs. They often get overlooked, right? 

Not by me. And I think if there is something that I have done, it is that I have spent more time thinking about challenging emergency services chiefs and reinventing prehospital care in New York City. It's a must. 

What specifically do you want to do about prehospital care?People call 911 when they should be calling a taxi. And until we get to the ability to tell people, “No, we're not taking you to the hospital,” which we don't have the authority to do … We are going to miss the cardiac arrest (call), where we have a chance to save someone's life. 

We're piloting lots of different concepts around my ideas, working hand in glove with our chief of fire operations and our chief of EMS, because 50% of what my engine companies are doing are medical. The future of FDNY is EMS. (We receive) 1.6 million calls for service a year. 

The bottom line is that the crisis involves recruiting. People just don't want to be EMTs anymore … The only people who are coming to us these days, about who want to be EMTs, are people who want to start the clock to become firefighters. After four years, they just go over to fire operations. It was invented before me as a back door to get in. It's now the front door. It's, in fact, the only one. The next 1,500 firefighters in New York City will come from EMS. But what does that mean? It means 1,500 out, and I don’t think we have 300 that want to come in.

What about the rank and file? 

I think they know I have their back. An old fire chief put his arm around me at my swearing-in and he said, "Want some advice?" I said, "Sure." He said, "Treat these guys well and they'll kill for you!" And guess what? He's right. I'm doing more than treating them well. I'm managing them very hands-on. One of the great benefits of coming from the outside is, I don't suffer from 30 years of institutional operations that say, “That's not how we do it.” I don't know how we do it. So good news is, why don't we try it a different way? 

And unlike in the NYPD, there's a little more freedom to tell the boss what to do in the FDNY that doesn't exist in the police department. I love coffee, and I love going to firehouses. There's always coffee on, in the firehouses. And after about 30 minutes, there's always someone who wants to tell me how to do it. Instead of (saying), “Are you nuts? You know who I am?” I do the opposite. I embrace it and I love it.