FDNY accused of racial discrimination
The fire department from New York City is the second largest in the world after the one from Tokyo and one of the most respected in the world.
FDNY has over 11,000 firefighters and officers and they are very much valued for their heroic acts on many occasions, including the 11th of September. The only thing that can be held against them is that the entire FDNY is formed only from white officers and firemen. A federal judge says that this can be considered a longstanding discrimination in the hiring policy of FDNY and that the 159 years of racial discrimination has got to stop and they have stop hiring only white workers. A group of black firefighters sued FDNY eight years ago because the fire department was formed from 92 percent white firemen and only 2.8 percent black firemen in a city that has a 24 percent black population. Suzanna Goldberg, from Columbia Law School, says that the judges are in a very difficult situation because the fire department is highly appreciated by every one and has proved over time to be very heroic, but there is still a stain on their face: the accuses of racial discrimination. Last January a federal judge agreed with her opinion and ruled that the tests done for hiring new personnel at the FDNY were highly discriminatory and also illegal.
Paul Washington, the New York City fire captain, says that blacks fail to get the same results as whites at the admission tests, probably due to the blacks’ level of education, which is inferior to the whites’. Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston and Miami have corrected their racial unbalances by using quotas, but FDNY deputy chief Paul Mannix doesn’t think New York needs to follow their example and says that they are against quotas. Miami expanded recruitment by hiring young minorities that were still going to school and the best example is Chief Maurice Kemp, the first African-American to ever be in charge of the fire department. Kemp said that there is a lot of struggling involved, but everyone has to be conscious of the fact that there is need to be diverse. Paul Mannix believes that the test now taken by people to enter FDNY is focused more on producing a racially diverse department rather than on identifying the best candidate for the job regardless the race, and this is a side effect of the racial war that is going on inside FDNY and he believes that this will make the job of the firemen in the department more dangerous than it was before. The city plans that next time they have to hire firemen one third of them should be minority, but there are no real plans for hiring people and there were no job offers for the last two years.
