Last summer Mayor Michael Bloomberg swore in a new class of New York City police recruits. Among the 274 new officers, 58 percent were minority. The city proudly noted that the class "consists of recruits who were born in 22 countries."
But in a city that is half minority, only about 10 percent of New York firefighters are despite recent efforts to increase their numbers. Only 3.4 percent are black. This week that particular statistic came back and bit the city, in the form of a ruling by a federal judge that the Fire Department's hiring practices constituted "a pattern, practice and policy of intentional discrimination..." that was a "stain on the Fire Department's record."
The ruling seems to depict a city from another era, whose officials ignored calls for change and intentionally conspired to keep the Fire Department white. How could this be? How could a city where the police department has made major, and successful, efforts to recruit black officers, countenance a fire department that seemed to be going in the opposite direction?
I don't know whether the ruling will stand, but I can offer one explanation that does not require the public to believe that the leaders of the city of New York are closet racists.
It's the insular culture of the Fire Department.
We think of the fire and police services as more or less the same - the Finest and the Bravest, both risking their lives to keep us safe. But their lives are very different thing. The firefighter's job is much less varied and far less solitary than the cop's.
Firefighters live as a family, eating and sleeping and risking their lives together in a unit. It creates a sense of solidarity that is passed down from father to son. Insular, proud, and extremely hard to manage from the outside.
To see the grandeur and the problems of the fire culture, just look at September 11. The men who rushed into the towers, heedless of their own safety, were following the department creed. After they died, their firefighter fathers and brothers and friends also raced to the World Trade Center site to search for their bodies. They ignored all safety protocols in their drive to reclaim their lost men. For too long, the city deferred to their grief and near irrationality. When safety rules were finally imposed, the firefighters nearly rioted in anger, they were so desperate to go back to proving their bond with their comrades by risking their lives breathing toxic air and digging in unstable piles of rubble for their comrades.
If the goal of the Fire Department is just to put out fires, the easiest way to manage it is to let it alone. Over and over again, mayors of the city of New York have tried to impose some 20th, then 21st, century organizational structure and come to grief. Rudy Giuliani, for all his boasts of toughness, could never get the firefighters to work with the police department.
Michael Bloomberg had precious little luck in closing down fire houses, even though there were too many of them in the wrong places for the most efficient deployment.
The Fire Department is a world of fathers and sons who want to pass their traditions down the family tree. You do not have to be a racist to want your own white son or grandson to join your fraternity, even if it means putting someone else's black son on hold.
The tests helped to accomplish that goal. Don't think they were designed to exclude blacks. But once it turned out that was the outcome, it would certainly have been possible to design a different test that creates a more diverse pool of candidates.
But to get there, the city would have had to mess with the Fire Department, and who wants to? They're heroes. They like things the way they are. That's true of everything from the location of the fire houses to the way the tests are written.
The city says it will appeal the ruling, and it is hard to predict how things will work out. This is not the most favorable time in the world to bring a fire department discrimination suit. Anyone who followed Sonia Sotomayor's elevation to the Supreme Court remembers the suit by white firefighters in New Haven, who won a 5-4 victory in the Supreme Court that revolved around a test for promotion.
If you are a lawyer, I welcome your opinion on the legality of the whole thing. But looking at the situation practically and politically, it is crazy to have a city in which one of the major public safety services is virtually all white while the city is more than a quarter black.
Also, applying for the FDNY is not limited to New York City residents.
As for life in the firehouse? there is no greater example of a job where you are "judged by the content of your character".
You would have to go through all the facts before jumping to conclusion and from what I gather from the article this has not be done.
what I found weird was that you make huge leap in logic by stating the test are designed to exclude blacks?? How is this so??
Last time I took a civil service exam their was book that we all studied from to prepare for the same test.
J
The agency that administrates the testing process right up until the time that your number comes up is DCAS. They handle this process for ALL of the civil service agencies. They give the tests and they don't turn you over to the FDNY until your number is reached for hire. That's it, end of story.
I agree with your conclusion. I live in a predominately black middle class suburb, and yet our Fire Department is 99.9% white. We do have a black chief who was hired by our black mayor, but the white members of the department have been trying to get rid of him ever since he came on board, not because he's incompetent, but because he's not one of the good old boys!
I think this is a trend throughout the country, in large inner cities, in suburbs, in rural America, etc.
It took YEARS and generation after generation to finally break this trend in our police departments, but the fire departments aren't ready to let go ...
But you can't discount family tradition. If you want to take a job like this and your father or brother or cousin is a cop, you're more likely to try to become a cop. If your father was a firefighter, it's more likely you'll go that way.
I don't know how it is that minorities came to be under-represented in the fire department, but with family and neighborhood tradition playing such a big roll, it's not surprising that it continues.
If the fire department is practicing discrimination, it should end. If the comradery of the firehouse has a racist tinge, that should end. My guess is, neither of those is true.
You can try and encourage a guy who is applying for the job in the police dept. or the transit system to go for the fire department instead, but if I were lying unconscious in a burning building, I would hope the guy who is coming in to save me is a guy who really really wanted to be a firefighter.
does the application ask if you have relatives in the dep't? if so, does this result in an advantage? if this is the case ~ and if the nepotism is resulting in such a ridiculously disproportional department, then it seems clear to me at least that the nepotism has got to be eliminated.
like it or not, if they currently do give an advantage to applicants with family in service, then it seems clear that they need to stop that practice. maybe they even need to make it a DISadvantage ~
just sayin' ~
A legacy is a social issue and usually not of importance or consequence to employment.
Having a father that was a firefighter doesn't bestow any genetic gifts for firefighting on the progeny, it just creates a method to continue discrimination.