FDNY Entrance Exam Biased Against Minorities?

Bonestorm said:
If you want to argue that the test is not discriminatory, you should start by looking that the opinions that issued from the federal district court and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and explain how each of those courts got it wrong. I'm sure the opinions are available online.
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http://www.timesnewsweekly.com/news/2012-05-17/Editorial

This is the latest miscarriage of justice stemming from Federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis’ decision against the New York City Fire Department in a lawsuit over the department’s written entrance exam. He declared that the test discriminated against minorities and demanded that the FDNY do more to diversify its staff.

The judge’s ruling was based on the fact that the FDNY has an overabundance of white employees. In the end, he sided with members of the Vulcan Society, a fraternal society of black firefighters who filed the discrimination suit, who wanted more blacks on the job.
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Abraxas said:
Taft makes the entirely reasonable point that the Village Voice, the bible of liberalism is ridiculing this test, I am fairly certain that they had access to the rest of it as well.
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How about this, we now get to the heart of the matter and I didn't have to look very far! There is a genuine problem with the racial makeup of the NYFD but it has absolutely nothing to do with the entrance exam.

In 1971, blacks constituted 32 percent of the city’s population, but only 5 percent of the fire department. Almost four decades later, only 3.4 percent of the FDNY is black, and less than 7 percent is Latino. In a city with only a 35 percent white population, the FDNY is about 90 percent white. (Women are also woefully underrepresented in the FDNY, but that’s allowable under federal law because of the physical requirements involved in firefighting, which proportionally fewer women can meet.)

Other city departments don’t have such stark numbers. The NYPD, for example, is 16.6 percent black and 18 percent Latino. Those levels are each lower than the actual population, but the practices used to reach them are within federal guidelines.
New York’s fire department is also whiter than those in other cities. Of the fire departments in eight of the nation’s largest cities, New York’s is dead last in diversity.
The FDNY perennially can’t seem to lift its minority hiring numbers at all. “This pattern of underrepresentation has remained essentially unchanged since at least the 1960s,” U.S. Federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis recently wrote in one of many rulings against the city, later adding, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
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http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-12-15/news/fdny-extrance-exam-non-white-hiring/
 
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Abraxas said:
I am sure that you could provide the evidence if you put your mind to it, never stopped you in the past.
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The lovely thing is that I don't need to litigate whether the test is discriminatory on this here board, as the issue has already been litigated in the courts.
 
I went to one of the links in the OP that takes you to another six-page article (HOSED). It's not just about the test.

Nafis Sabir is an African-American who wants to be a New York City firefighter. When he sat for the city’s most recent exam in January 2007, known as test “6019,” he scored in the top handful out of nearly 22,000 candidates...

Sabir says the exam answers were often comically obvious. “They might ask, ‘Someone comes in the firehouse and looks at you with a crazy look. You can speak to him about it, talk to a supervisor, or punch him in the face. Which one should you not do?’ ” He laughs joylessly. If the test was easy, subsequent events have been difficult.

Although Sabir’s results should have been good enough to get him in, for the past three years, he and hundreds of others have been stuck in a strange kind of limbo. Initially, their start date at the Fire Academy was delayed by budget shortfalls. Then, he and his classmates learned that the test they aced was found to be racist by the federal court, and they wouldn’t be allowed to take positions in the department until a better test could be devised, or the city could come up with some other way to hire new firefighters.

In other words, Sabir, a black man, can’t get a job because he passed a test the court believes was intended to make him fail because of his race.

“First, they said they couldn’t hire us because of money. Then they said they couldn’t because minorities didn’t score well. I don’t get it,” says David Cargin, another African-American man in the same position...

But there’s another wrinkle. Sabir and Cargin, who aced the last test, have been waiting so long that they are now considered too old to take a new entrance exam. They can’t even sit for a do-over exam unless the rules are changed.

http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-12-15/news/fdny-extrance-exam-non-white-hiring/1/
 
I know how some are going to feel about what I say here, but; affirmative action really hasn't done this country any favors at all. I do understand the glass ceiling and racism, but I think that our government in particular was a lot more efficeint across the board. In some respects affirmative action, in my view, has a created a necessity to hire two instead of one. I this is true in private industry as well.

The thing we moved away from in the 60s was our insistance on pushing people to be better in everything they do. The work ethic has dropped quite a bit: the speed at which we've been pushed to wrok has a lot to do with that as well, but the country is different because of it. A lot things, in the military as well, have been toward a weaker expectation to able to provide opportunities for those who really shouldn't be there. The San Francisco fire department is a good example: SF used to be the second greatest fire department in the world, right behind Tokyo. The came affirmative action and that standing has gone away.

I don't want to be labor it, but I've noticed a huge difference in last 40 years.
 
The problem is that the courts are quite clearly using equality of outcome to gauge equality of opportunity.

False premise, logical flaw.

http://nypost.com/2012/10/01/biased-arrogant/

Today, federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis is opening his court to those who object to his remedial order in the discrimination lawsuit against the FDNY. So many have signed up, he’s already had to extend the session to four days, even though he’s only allowing two minutes of testimony per person.

It’s still too little, too late: As a matter of simple justice, the Second Court of Appeals needs to grant New York City’s request to overturn Garaufis’ recent rulings, and hand the case to a different judge. He’s shown himself to be hopelessly biased as well as arrogant.

His ruling on Friday, allowing the department to hire off the city’s latest civil-service exam, doesn’t change that. Indeed, there are serious grounds to worry that the city watered down this test to a dangerous degree in order to comply with Garaufis’ outrageous dictates.

The evidence for Garuafis’ bias starts with the fact that he granted summary judgment in favor of the Vulcan Society’s claim that the city intentionally discriminated against minorities with its firefighter exam.

This was shocking, because all precedent says that summary judgment should only be granted if there’s no serious question of fact — and the city had reams and reams of evidence to disprove the Vulcans’ claims.

Simply put, Garaufis simply ignored the city’s expensive and extensive efforts to integrate the FDNY (including quota hiring in the 1970s and more than $20 million spent on minority recruitment since 1989). Because he doesn’t like the racial balance the tests produce, he declared the FDNY to be “a stubborn bastion of white- male privilege.”

This, from a member of the federal bench — which has about the same percentage of white men as the FDNY.

Add to this Garaufis’ overreach. In this stage of the overall case, Garaufis found fault exclusively with certain FDNY civil-service exams. The courts specifically refused the Vulcans’ request to bring in issues such as recruitment and the character-review process.

By precedent, this means that Garaufis’ remedies are supposed to focus exclusively on the FDNY exams — yet in fact his “remedy” ruling stretched to cover department recruiting and character review, among other issues.

To appreciate the great irony here, realize that Garaufis is clearly guilty of what he considers misconduct within the Fire Department.

It galls the judge that firefighters have a habit of recommending the job to friends and family — even though those friends and family still have to pass a competitive examination to qualify. (And even though the Vulcans do much the same with their friends and family.)

Yet Garaufis himself, in this very case, has named the partner of a friend to a lucrative position — without any sort of competitive vetting process.

Specifically, last November the judge named Mark Cohen as the special monitor overseeing the FDNY for the court, authorized to review and approve any aspect of the FDNY hiring process as well as to overhaul the procedure for investigating discrimination complaints.

Cohen’s name wasn’t submitted for consideration by any of the parties. In fact, the Vulcan Society — the main plaintiff in the case — objected to him. We don’t know why; maybe the Vulcans were worried that Cohen doesn’t have much civil-rights or labor experience. (Or maybe they disliked the fact that he has no background in firefighting or disaster relief.)

The judge gave Cohen the job anyway.

Cohen is a law partner of Lawrence Gresser. And Gresser and his wife, Carole, are very good friends of Nicholas Garaufis from the Queens political world. They’ve even attended the annual New Year’s Day party at the Garaufis home.

Also troubling is that, one week before Cohen’s appointment was announced, the law firm of Cohen and Gresser signed a 10-year lease for the 19th floor at 800 Third Ave., adding to their offices on the 20th and 21st floors. Cohen’s employment as special monitor is expected to last 10 years.

One more bit of insult: Garaufis has refused the city’s request to review Cohen’s billing for his special-monitor work, so no one except Garaufis knows what he’s done to earn the $855,000 he’s already charged the city’s taxpayers.

Let me close with one final bit of outrageous conduct that should get Garaufis tossed off the case: his attempts to chill the free speech of those who criticize his rulings.

Last August, the judge summoned Fire Commisioner Salvatore Cassano to his courtroom specifically to ask what actions the commissioner could take against “senior uniformed officials” who “were writing columns in the newspaper” or “criticizing the process or the litigation here.” The commissioner had to explain the obvious First Amendment issues to the judge.

If any more evidence were needed that Judge Garaufis has lost all objectivity in this case, that incident alone should do it.
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jet57 said:
I know how some are going to feel about what I say here, but; affirmative action really hasn't done this country any favors at all. I do understand the glass ceiling and racism, but I think that our government in particular was a lot more efficeint across the board. In some respects affirmative action, in my view, has a created a necessity to hire two instead of one. I this is true in private industry as well.

The thing we moved away from in the 60s was our insistance on pushing people to be better in everything they do. The work ethic has dropped quite a bit: the speed at which we've been pushed to wrok has a lot to do with that as well, but the country is different because of it. A lot things, in the military as well, have been toward a weaker expectation to able to provide opportunities for those who really shouldn't be there. The San Francisco fire department is a good example: SF used to be the second greatest fire department in the world, right behind Tokyo. The came affirmative action and that standing has gone away.

I don't want to be labor it, but I've noticed a huge difference in last 40 years.
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You've done it now, Darla will have your guts for garters.
 
http://www.amren.com/news/2012/03/judges-orders-millions-paid-in-nyc-firefighter-bias-case/

A U.S. district judge ordered New York City to pay $128 million in to firefighters who allege the city used an entrance exam that deliberately sought to keep African-Americans and Latino Americans off the force. The judge also ordered the FDNY to hire 293 black and Latino applicants.

The federal government had sued the city (United States of America and Vulcan Society Inc. vs. City of New York) alleging the city violated the U.S. Constitution and local civil rights laws by using an entrance exam intentionally designed to discriminate based on race.

The lawsuit alleged that the exams had little to do with firefighting and instead focused on cognitive and reading skills.
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Frankly, an insulting ruling. Employing "cognitive and reading skills" is "intentionally designed to discriminate based on race."

I suppose a $65,000 check salves some of the sting. :rolleyes:
 
Bonestorm said:
If your contention is that both courts made errors of law or fact in ruling that the test is discriminatory, please point them out.
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You said the test was racially biased, the Village Voice said it wasn't but you still bang on regardless. Stop trying to hide behind the court and use your own voice, it never stopped you in the past.
 
jet57 said:
I know how some are going to feel about what I say here, but; affirmative action really hasn't done this country any favors at all. I do understand the glass ceiling and racism, but I think that our government in particular was a lot more efficeint across the board. In some respects affirmative action, in my view, has a created a necessity to hire two instead of one. I this is true in private industry as well.

The thing we moved away from in the 60s was our insistance on pushing people to be better in everything they do. The work ethic has dropped quite a bit: the speed at which we've been pushed to wrok has a lot to do with that as well, but the country is different because of it. A lot things, in the military as well, have been toward a weaker expectation to able to provide opportunities for those who really shouldn't be there. The San Francisco fire department is a good example: SF used to be the second greatest fire department in the world, right behind Tokyo. The came affirmative action and that standing has gone away.

I don't want to be labor it, but I've noticed a huge difference in last 40 years.
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I hate to say I told you so, but....................
 
Abraxas said:
You said the test was racially biased, the Village Voice said it wasn't but you still bang on regardless. Stop trying to hide behind the court and use your own voice, it never stopped you in the past.
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This is one of those issues liberals prefer to "feel" their way through. When the discussion ceases to advance upon feelings and then requires thinking to proceed any further, liberals find themselves applying the ugly soft racism of lowered expectations.

I imagine the staff at the Village Voice sat around sat around making the same arguments, hit the same wall, and said to themselves, "WTF are we doing? This is absurd!" :awesome:
 
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