Copyright 2006 Newsday, Inc.
By SHERYL McCARTHY
Newsday
As the Fire Department graduated its latest class of probationary firefighters last week, Capt. Paul Washington and some of his black colleagues stood outside the ceremony to protest an enduring problem. Of the 139 new probies, just six were black, bringing the total number of black firefighters on the 11,400-member force to 325 - only 2.9 percent.
That’s a paltry number. But compared with the numbers in other cities, it’s pathetic. Boston, a city known for its racial tensions, has managed to assemble a fire department that is 25 percent black, about the same percentage of blacks in the city’s population. And in Baltimore and Chicago, the percentages are 30 percent and 23 percent, respectively. Yet while Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta claim to be trying everything to make the Fire Department more racially diverse, New York ranks at the bottom of the big cities.
“The department puts on a front that things are changing, and really they’re not,” Washington says. “They make their efforts sound heroic, but the resources are pitiful.”
Karen Miller, a black woman who’s been a firefighter in Boston for two decades, admits that she’s “been astounded by New York’s numbers for years.”
Why is Boston doing so much better? It took a court order. In the 1970s, a court found that the fire department there not only was turning down highly qualified black applicants, but that its written test, while not measuring one’s ability to do the job, had the effect of eliminating black applicants. As a result, the test was changed and the department was ordered to hire one applicant of color for every white applicant it hired.
By 2003, the percentage of blacks in the department was on par with their numbers in the city, and the court order was reversed.
A similar court ruling in New York in the 1970s required the city to hire one black firefighter for every four firefighters, the result of a lawsuit brought by the Vulcan Society, an association of black firefighters. This remedial effort lasted two years, and boosted the number of black firefighters considerably. By the early 1980s, there were 700 blacks in the department, but since then, their number has slipped dramatically.
The Fire Department’s main problems are its recruiting and hiring methods. Not enough blacks apply, and of those who do, few make the cut. Only 9 percent of those who sat for the last exam in 2002 were black, even though 27 percent of the city’s residents are black. With so few firefighters in black communities to talk up the advantages of the job, it will take a huge marketing effort by the city to let young blacks know that this is a job with good pay, good benefits and job security - and that while there are dangers, they won’t be running into burning buildings every day. The city also needs to do a serious public relations campaign aimed at dispelling the image of the department as a white guy’s club in which black firefighters are isolated and mistreated. On the contrary, the black firefighters I’ve talked to say they love their work.
And Bloomberg took the right step when he allocated more than $1 million a year to recruit year-round for the department.
The city also needs to change the way it uses the written exam. Black firefighters have long claimed that the test, while eliminating black applicants, doesn’t really measure the skills required to do the job. According to the Vulcan Society, which complained about the test to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the commission agrees. The hiring process is being investigated by the Justice Department.
The city can also create a one-track program for paramedics and firefighters like those that have proved successful in recruiting more black firefighters in other cities. And it can make other changes: Make the written test count less, make part of the test an oral exam, which blacks tend to do better on, and give the test more often. A few years ago, I wrote that blacks who were committed to going through the lengthy process and studied hard for the written test could get hired just like whites. But seeing the department’s shockingly low number of blacks compared to other cities changed my mind. If other fire departments can achieve such a high level of racial diversity - and I assume they fight fires just as well in Boston as they do here - then clearly something’s wrong with the city’s hiring methods.
As other cities prove, there’s no shortage of ways to fix this problem. New York just has to find the will to do it.