Nashville Fire Department: Firefighters Taking Pics While Fighting Fires & Selfies at Scenes?

We discovered an alarming trend over the past few days while researching the Nashville Fire Department, and the social media posts made by it’s employees – who are mainly firefighters and medics that we depend on to save lives during emergencies and be 100% focused on the job in front of them. The trend that we have noticed is that it appears many of these medics and firefighters take the time during rescues, incidents, operations, and fighting fires, to take personal photos – and then they share them on social media – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, etc… by the HUNDREDS!

We’ve also learned via their own comments and statements on photos that some firefighters are allegedly wearing PERSONAL HELMET cams during responses. This creates problems that we can’t even begin to touch on in this article – such as, is the footage archived? Is it available for a FOIA request? Is it official footage? Can it be used in an investigation? Can the public request it? How is it not managed by the city? How is this even allowed? Some of the images below are collected from helmet cams, according to those that posted them(firefighters).

A quick search of some common hashtags, such as #NashvilleFire #NashvilleFirefighters etc.. turned up hundreds and hundreds of photos taken at scenes of incidents – all in direct violation of the social media policy, which requires specific approval before taking photos at scenes and posting them on social media, even on personal accounts – especially when the employee is identifiable by all of the uniforms and logos to be a member of the Nashville Fire Department. Here is the specific part of the policy that prohibits these photos – and unless the Director Chief is spending his days allowing hundreds of photos to be posted on social media, we’ll assume these are in violation of that policy:

c) Employees are prohibited from publishing any photos or information related to a Departmental incident without prior consent from the Director-Chief or his designee.

And the public has noticed! more than one of these photos shared on social media has comments such as this one, from a citizen:

“…save somebody and quit snapping pics…”

“… I don’t want halff my ass burnt off and look up and you got ya iPhone out like “like hold on y’all get a lol closer so I can get all y’all on instagram”… “

Here’s a small fraction of the sampling we found, just by some simple searches on Instagram – there are hundreds, if not thousands, more – including those on snapchat, facebook, and twitter, which we have not published here.

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Here are the some of the individual images, if you’re on mobile, or for easier browsing: