The two departments as they stand

NOVEMBER 2026 · VERIFIED FOR THIS HISTORY

Fire: The South Bend Fire Department of November 2026 is a career department of 256 full-time firefighters in four divisions, serving a population of approximately 103,000 — the figures of the department's own page — working from the eleven stations the roster above lists, under Chief Carl R. Buchanon, who joined the department in 1986 and whose succession is carried in Public Servants. The department holds an ISO Class 1 rating, as Chief Buchanon's own statement on the department's page records with pride: "the brave men and women who have made the South Bend Fire Department an ISO Class 1 Department." Its work is no longer mostly fire: the 2024 budget hearing in the City Clerk's Personnel and Finance minutes records eleven staffed stations, four ambulance billing associates on the staff, an increase in dispatch runs from 2023 to 2024, average fire engines in service sixteen to nineteen years, and a department that conducts confined-space, water, technical and hazardous-materials rescue — the Indiana River Rescue Training School is run by the fire department, and its "Fire Nuggets" program gives live-fire training to other departments. Station 1's house carries the specialty units the modern service is made of: the Tactical Rescue Unit, the Hazardous Materials Unit and the SCUBA Unit, with boats at Stations 2 and 9.

Police: The South Bend Police Department of November 2026 is headquartered at 701 West Sample Street, under Chief Scott Ruszkowski, the department's sixty-second chief, in office since 1 October 2015; the chiefs' line is carried in Public Servants, which also records the department's newest first — Maranda Baker, announced 26 October 2026 as its first woman division chief, over the Patrol Division. The Board of Public Safety meets at headquarters and governs both departments, hiring, swearing and disciplining their members in the same minutes that have recorded the services since the nineteenth century. The department does not publish a current sworn strength on the pages reached; its documented strengths stand at their dates — 230 officers in 1991, beside the fire department's 212 — and no later figure is printed without its source.

The arc: The two services began in the same town meeting world — constables and a bucket line — and they end this record as the city's two uniformed professions, one of them grown from eleven paid men and twenty call men in 1886 to a department whose ambulances and rescue units answer more than twenty thousand calls a year, the other from a marshal with a badge to a department of divisions and bureaus. Their dead are kept by the city's own hand: eight firefighters' names on a stone at Seitz Park, fifteen officers' names in a council resolution, and a fire department page that closes, as this section does, in memory.

Sources:

1. City of South Bend, Fire Department page (southbendin.gov, read 10 November 2026) — 256 full-time firefighters in four divisions; population served approximately 103,000; Chief Carl R. Buchanon's statement and the ISO Class 1 rating; the "In Memory" roll.
2. City of South Bend, City Clerk's Personnel and Finance Committee minutes, 21 August 2024 (city document archive) — eleven stations, four ambulance billing associates, dispatch-run increase, engine ages, the rescue disciplines, the Indiana River Rescue Training School and "Fire Nuggets."
3. City of South Bend, Board of Public Safety agendas (30 August 2023; 20 November 2024, city document archive) — meetings at the Police Department, 701 West Sample Street; the hirings and swearings-in of both departments.
4. The Public Servants section of this history (banked) — Chief Ruszkowski's tenure from 1 October 2015; Chief Buchanon's from April 2020; Maranda Baker's appointment, 26 October 2026.