May 22, 2007
Justice Dept. Sues New York City, Citing Bias in Hiring Firefighters
By ANDY NEWMAN

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.