By Paul Pinkham
Florida Times-Union (Jacksonville)
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — A judge is reviewing issues first raised in a 1971 civil rights complaint about hiring practices in Jacksonville’s fire department after a group of black firefighters resurrected the old lawsuit.
The case was inactive for two decades and is so old it had to be retrieved from a storage facility in Atlanta.
At issue, then and now, is the racial breakdown of new hires at the Jacksonville Fire and Rescue Department, an agency long plagued by racial discontent.
The Jacksonville Brotherhood of Firefighters contends the city should still be bound by a 1982 federal court decree that required hiring one black firefighter for every new white firefighter until the makeup of the department paralleled that of the city.
The city says that goal was met in 1992, and the 1:1 hiring requirement was discontinued. City Hall lawyers argued in court last month that nothing in the 1982 order required a judge’s approval to make that decision.
U.S. District Judge Timothy Corrigan has indicated he will rule in four to six weeks on whether the brotherhood and three individuals denied jobs at the department are even eligible to assume the plaintiff’s role in the case. If they are, he then will turn his attention to whether the city’s 1992 decision was legal.
Lawyers for the brotherhood first moved in 2007 for unspecified contempt of court sanctions against the city for failing to comply with the 1982 decree. They said the city has never offered proof that it complied with the order in 1992 and, in fact, misled the brotherhood and others about the hiring ratios. The city denies that.
“Had the city done what it was supposed to do, it would have had a hearing before a court,” said Dennis Thompson, the group’s Ohio attorney, who specializes in firefighter discrimination cases.
Further, Thompson said the number of black firefighters in the department has remained stable since 1993 while the department has grown, meaning African-Americans are less represented than they were 16 years ago.
Uniformed personnel jumped from 917 in 1993 to 1,131 in 2007, while the number of black firefighters stayed in the 220s.
That’s roughly 20 percent of the department, while the black population of the city is about 30 percent, Thompson said. He said the city needs an additional 135 black firefighters to match the population percentage.
The ratio in the department will only get worse, he said, because many black firefighters were hired in the 1980s and early ‘90s under the federal court order and are due to retire soon.
“It will be as if the decree never existed at all,” Thompson said. “This is not an issue of somebody who wants a leg up. That’s not what they’re saying. This is a situation of what’s best for the city of Jacksonville.”
But city officials disagree and question why the brotherhood raised the issue 15 years after the fact. Current ratios and upcoming retirements are irrelevant, said Assistant General Counsel Mary Jarrett.
“This is a hiring case,” she said. She argued in court that Thompson’s talk of achieving parity based on current statistics shows the real motive is a racial quota system and would require the city to meet a constantly moving target.
Deputy General Counsel Ernst Mueller pointed out that during much of the time period Thompson complains about, Jacksonville had a black fire chief, Ray Alfred, who tried to hire more minority firefighters.
“We were trying to hire minority candidates. They just weren’t applying,” Mueller said.
That’s turned around in recent years, said Randy Wyse, president of the Jacksonville Association of Fire Fighters. He said African-Americans outnumbered white recruits at the most recent fire academy, the most diverse class ever.
But Thompson said that’s a result of his litigation.
“They couldn’t find these black recruits until after we filed our motion and they were under scrutiny,” he said.
Copyright 2009 The Florida Times-Union