09/03/2026
Please take a moment to read this from my good friend Lorraine Carli the Vice President of NFPA
THE ASSAULT ON SAFETY
By Lorraine Carli
11-Aug-2026
At a recent conference on leadership in community risk reduction, I talked about how that leadership can combat a troubling trend: the assault on safety. The assault is not a single event or bad decision, but rather a pattern of actions that weakens the protections that communities assume are in place to keep us safe.
The dilemma is that the better our system of safety works, the easier it is to take it for granted. People don’t think about codes, inspections, training, enforcement, prevention, or public education until something goes wrong. When safety is invisible, it becomes easy to ignore or trade away. People assume we can relax the guardrails because there are fewer catastrophes, when in fact, the absence of catastrophe is often evidence that the system is working.
That’s where leadership matters, and it’s why leaders need a clear understanding of community risk reduction, or CRR, and how it works. CRR is not a program you add on when you have time—it’s a way of leading. It is the discipline of identifying and prioritizing your community’s risks and making strategic, coordinated investments of resources to reduce how often those risks occur and how loss is minimized when they do.
CRR leadership is what happens when we stop measuring success only by what we respond to and start measuring success by what never happens at all. It’s proactive, data-informed, partnership-driven, and grounded in a simple idea: if we can predict the conditions that create harm, we can create better outcomes. That’s why CRR leaders care deeply about the foundations that make prevention possible: codes and standards, the people trained to apply them, and the local systems that ensure they’re used. CRR leadership is inseparable from protecting the broader system of safety.
The challenge is that when people hear “assault on safety,” they assume we’re talking about one controversial bill or actions taken in one jurisdiction. In fact, the assault is a widespread, dangerous effort to weaken safety protections in the name of speed, cost-cutting, or politics, often without understanding how those protections prevent loss. It can be legislation that removes or waters down technical requirements outside the proven consensus process. It can be rules that slow code updates for years or shift the makeup of local regulatory bodies in favor of special interests. It can be steps that shrink a community’s capacity for plan review and inspection or that alter those processes in ways that create accountability gaps, such as allowing builders or architects to conduct self-reviews.
When safety is weakened, it doesn’t fail in just one way. It fails in massive, disastrous ways, and it fails in more subtle ways in the places where risk is already concentrated, especially among people with fewer resources who live in historically underserved communities. Risk is changing, and the stakes are increasing. While the built environment is evolving, technology is outpacing regulation. New hazards—from energy storage to more complex buildings and infrastructure—demand up-to-date codes. If the system of safety erodes as risk accelerates, the problem is compounded. The poor decisions made now create community risk for future generations.
One part of an effective CRR leadership strategy is sharing NFPA’s Safety Doesn’t Happen by Chance campaign. Be vocal about the attack on safety and what it means for your community. Advocate for using current codes, the value of inspections and plan review, and training the workforce that designs, installs, maintains, and enforces safety. Don’t wait for a safety-bashing bill to appear or a tragedy to occur—build relationships early. Explain in plain language what codes do and how they do it. Show what enforcement prevents. Help people understand that safety doesn’t happen by chance.
To learn more about community risk reduction and how you can use it to fight the assault on safety, visit nfpa.org/crr.
IAFC Fire and Life Safety Section
IAFC - International Association of Fire Chiefs
