blue canary
n.— «“This is a different kind of training, because usually an officer rushes right in. Here, we get them to approach slowly and size up the situation,” said Chinn, a former narcotics officer who first got anti-terrorism training to deal with threats from Colombian drug lords. “We don’t want firefighters to use police officers like blue canaries. If a firefighter counts down until he finds the last police officer, that’s not a good thing.”…“Identify. Isolate. Notify. Stay uphill, upwind, upstream and at least 300 feet away.…Don’t be a blue canary. Don’t be a coptometer.”» —“Terror Incident Rewrites Police Manuals” by Monica Rhor Miami Herald (Florida) Nov. 11, 2001. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
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