The FDNY discriminated against black and Hispanic applicants for years through written exams that bore “little relationship to the job of a firefighter,” a judge ruled yesterday.
Brooklyn federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis said the “discriminatory effects” of the SAT-style tests helped limit the number of minority firefighters to just 303 blacks and 605 Hispanics — or 3.4 and 6.7 percent, respectively — out of a total force of 8,998 in 2007.
“These numbers stand in stark contrast to some of the nation’s other large cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia and Houston, where minority firefighters have been represented in significantly higher percentages,” Garaufis wrote.
The judge also said that the department’s “unlawful practices barred more than a thousand additional black and Hispanic applicants from consideration for appointment as FDNY firefighters, and unfairly delayed the appointment of hundreds of black and Hispanic firefighters.”
Lawyer Shayana Kadidal of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents the Vulcan Society of black firefighters, said Garaufis would likely hold a nonjury trial within the next year to determine a solution and award back pay and other damages.
Another plaintiffs’ attorney, Dana Lossia, said, “this decision has the potential to radically change the look of the Fire Department and really infuse it with the diversity it’s been lacking for decades.”
Garaufis’ ruling follows a recent Supreme Court reversal of high-court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s decision in a controversial discrimination case involving firefighters and race.
The high court reinstated a suit filed by white New Haven firefighters challenging the Connecticut city’s decision to nullify the results of a promotion test because few minorities passed it. The suit had been tossed by a lower court, a decision upheld by an appellate panel on which Sotomayor sat.
The New York City case involved two tests, administered in 1999 and 2002, from which would-be firefighters were chosen for the physical exam needed to gain admission to the Fire Academy.
Garaufis said, “overwhelming” disparities in the pass/fail rates between whites and minorities meant that “approximately 293 additional black and Hispanic candidates would have been appointed from the eligibility lists used from 2001 through 2008, and approximately 249 black and Hispanic applicants who were actually appointed would have been appointed sooner.”
Law Department spokeswoman Connie Pankratz said the city would not decide whether to appeal Garaufis’ ruling until after “a judgment has been made regarding a remedy.”
Georgia Pestana, chief of the city Law Department’s Labor and Employment Division, said officials were “disappointed and respectfully disagree with the court’s decision, but emphasize that the lawsuit and the decision concern tests given in 1999 and 2002.”
Pestana said a new test was administered in January 2007, and that a $2 million recruitment campaign and free tutoring helped triple the number of blacks and nearly doubled the number of Hispanics who took the exam.
“Over one-third of the most recent graduating class of probationary firefighters are minorities — the most diverse in the City’s history,” he added.