Justice Dept. Sues
NYC, Citing Bias
in Hiring
Firefighters
By ANDY NEWMAN,
NYTimes on the Web, May 22, 2007
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Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
A group of
black firefighters gathered at City Hall for the announcement of a
suit against the city. |
The United States Department of
Justice filed a civil rights suit against New York City yesterday over the Fire
Department’s written entrance exam, which black and Hispanic candidates fail at
much higher rates than whites. The suit claims that the city has never
proved a link between test scores and performance as a firefighter.
The suit is the latest in a series of legal attempts going back decades to
diversify the Fire Department, which is more than 90 percent white. Three
percent of the department’s 11,000 firefighters are black and 4.5 percent are
Hispanic, a tiny proportion in a city where more than half the population is
black or Hispanic.
The city’s testing practices “do not select the firefighter applicants who will
best perform their important public safety mission, while disproportionately
screening out large numbers of qualified black and Hispanic applicants,” Wan J.
Kim, assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division, said in a
statement.
In many other large cities, the percentage of minority firefighters is much
higher, often as a result of court-ordered integration; for example, more than
40 percent of firefighters in Los Angeles and Philadelphia are black or
Hispanic.
Officials in New York City, though, argue that great strides have been made in
recent years in recruiting black and Hispanic firefighters, that the city has
relaxed the education requirement, and that the percentage of black and Hispanic
hires has tripled in the past 10 years. Three times as many blacks and twice as
many Hispanics took the most recent firefighter test, offered in January, as the
previous one, in 2002. And the most recent test was overhauled to screen for a
broader range of abilities, giving blacks and Hispanics a better chance of
achieving higher grades, the city said.
“The only rational order that could come out of this would be for the judge to
order us to do what we have already done,” Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta
said.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg declared that the city would fight the suit. “The
Justice Department is not going to tell us what to do,” he told reporters. “We
try to do what’s right in this city, and if they disagree they’re welcome to go
to court with us.”
The suit, filed in United States District Court in Brooklyn, is based on the
1999 and 2002 tests, the latter of which is still being used to generate the
list of potential hires (scores on the January 2007 test have not been
announced). It seeks to change the Fire Department’s screening process and to
“make whole” black and Hispanic applicants harmed by the tests.
Like most Civil Service agencies, the Fire Department requires applicants to
pass a written multiple-choice test and gives preference to those who score
highest. Those who pass the test must then pass a test of strength, endurance
and agility.
Sample questions from test-preparation booklets the city released in the late
1990s test the prospective firefighter’s skills at reading comprehension,
deductive reasoning, logic, spatial orientation and mathematics.
For example, a passage on subway evacuations is followed by questions on what to
do in what order. In another question, the reader is given descriptions of
suspects in three arsons, then asked which of those fires the suspect in a
fourth arson should be linked to.
According to the Justice Department, 16.4 percent of black candidates and 7.2
percent of Hispanic candidates failed the 2002 written test by scoring below 70,
compared with 2.8 percent of white candidates. The ranks of those who scored 95
or above — the range that represents the bulk of applicants who are hired —
included 35 percent of all whites who passed the test but only 12.2 percent of
blacks and 21 percent of Hispanics who passed, the Justice Department said.
Georgia Pestana, the chief labor lawyer in the city Law Department, said that
the differences between minority and white test scores were not large enough to
show the “adverse impact” required for a civil rights complaint.
“Just because something is statistically significant doesn’t mean it’s of any
practical importance,” she said. “It’s something to put into a complaint because
it looks good.”
Under civil rights law, the city can be required to show the relevance of a test
to job performance if the test has an adverse impact on minority applicants. The
Justice Department said it disagreed with the city’s assertions that the tests
were sufficiently job-related.
The suit springs from complaints filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission in recent years by the Center for Constitutional Rights on behalf of
the Vulcan Society, a fraternal group for black firefighters, and several
individual firefighter applicants.
The center noted that after a court order in the 1970s required that the Fire
Department hire one minority member for every three whites, the proportion of
black firefighters grew to 7.7 percent, but that the percentage fell again after
the court order expired.
Black firefighters have long complained that they feel unwelcome in firehouses.
In recent years, said Paul Washington, a past president of the Vulcan Society, a
white firefighter in a Brooklyn firehouse showed off his makeshift Ku Klux Klan
hood to a black firefighter, and another black firefighter found a noose left
next to his work equipment.
Shayana Kadidal, a senior lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights, said
that with just 335 black firefighters spread among the city’s 221 firehouses,
“it makes every black firefighter into a Jackie Robinson in his own firehouse.”
John Coombs, president of the Vulcan Society, called the written test another
instrument of discrimination. “We have to have an exam based on nothing but
one’s potential to perform as a firefighter,” he said.
Diane Cardwell contributed reporting.
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