The first shot was fired on Feb. 16, ushering in a war of the sexes in city firehouses. The assault was launched not with a weapon, but with a letter by Regina Wilson, president of United Women Firefighters.
“Dear Judge [Nicholas] Garaufis,” she wrote in a two-page missive addressed to the Brooklyn federal judge. “Women firefighters are even more underrepresented in the FDNY than minority male firefighters.”
Then she dropped a rocket. Her message was clear as blue sky after a blaze: Hire more females. Or you’ll never get out of court.
“The UWF is exploring legal options to safeguard the rights and concerns of its membership. We are also considering a separate lawsuit specifically addressing the FDNY’s ongoing discrimination against women.”
There’s a hot flash for you.
Firewomen are mad as hell. Firemen are ready to mutiny. And that makes me feel positively unsafe.
Currently, there are just 32 women in the FDNY, a number based less on discrimination than on the biological fact that the vast majority of women are not built to carry 100 pounds of gear. And yet, that’s not good enough.
In January, Garaufis sided with black firemen who say the FDNY’s tests in 1999 and 2002 discriminated against minorities — a claim disputed by many rank-and-file firefighters. The judge, however, imposed racial hiring quotas and instituted tens of millions in back pay.
Now women want a piece of the action.
Trouble is, with firefighters, as opposed to office workers or rocket scientists, that means one thing: weakening the physical requirements so more women can pass the test. It’s happened before.
Wilson did not dispute that she’s eyeing altering the test.
“The testing needs to be based on the way things are out in the field,” she told me. “You can’t give me a test jumping over a brick wall; that’s not what we do every day as firefighters.
“If the emphasis is on the physical, we’re going to have a problem.”
One way to make the tests fairer, she said, was to adjust the way an applicant’s strength is judged — giving less weight to upper-body strength vs. overall strength.
“Testing of every portion of your body,” she said.
Holy smoke-eater!
In the 1980s, the city lowered standards three times to attract women — stupidly emphasizing speed, not strength.
(One of the first firewomen, Patricia Fitzpatrick, above in a 2006 PBS special, retired in 1998 due to a line-of-duty injury.)
The fighting words have blazed through male-dominated firehouses and lit up Internet message boards.
Deputy Fire Chief Paul Mannix, an outspoken critic of quotas, told me, “They don’t have women and men compete head-to-head in something as trivial as the Olympics. And when it comes to safety, that’s what they want to do.
“I’m worried about the women who live in New York City. They deserve the best Fire Department we can give them. If we continue to reduce standards, we’re not going to have that,” said Mannix, who does not speak for the FDNY, but for his organization, Merit Matters.
“I have a family,” another fireman said. “I can’t count on a 110-pound female to carry me out of a burning building.”
Maybe it’s me. But if I were to be caught in a fire, I’d feel a lot safer in the arms of a 6-foot man than those of a 5-foot girl.
You can’t choose the one who will rescue you. You can weaken the pool. And that is something this city can’t afford in the name of “diversity.”
Timesman Enquisitive
I can hear nooses unfurling from Bill Keller’s office to Maureen Dowd’s. An extraordinary event has occurred in the halls of self-aggrandizing media.
A New York Times columnist, waxing pompously about the National Enquirer’s chances for taking home a Pulitzer Prize for its breathtaking coverage of the John Edwards baby drama — OK, it was token conservative Ross Douthat, but still — wrote this:
“It might even deserve to win one.”
Well, yes. It might.
The Pulitzers, long considered journalism’s gem and the Times’ property, lost any claim to credibility in 2002. That’s when judges snubbed the iconic photograph of three firemen unfurling an American flag over a smoking Ground Zero on 9/11, shot by Thomas Franklin of The Record of Hackensack, in favor of generic photos by the Gray Lady. (Unclear whether it was the flag, or the white guys in the photo, that spooked the Pulitzer jury.)
It’s time to reward the paper that does amazing work. That would be the Enquirer.
Transit-job cuts sad but sensible
Bathed in red ink and incompetence, the folks who run your buses and subways are cutting 1,000 jobs, more than 500 of them “administrative” — which loosely translates to “paper pushers.” Subway station agents, the people you can never find to answer your questions, are also getting axed.
Sure, it’s sad. But will we really miss them?
Bureacucrats kill fun on a bun
It takes a village of bureaucrats to slice a hot dog.
No less an authority than the American Academy of Pediatrics demands that hot dogs carry warning labels, and wants them to be “redesigned” — not to reduce fat and calories, but so your little one can’t choke on them. The Food and Drug Administration will have the final say on standards for re-engineered tube steak.
Taking no chances, hot-dog stalwart Hebrew National told me it already puts warnings on its packages that say, “Child Safety: When serving hot dogs to young children, cut hot dogs lengthwise, then into small, easy-to-swallow pieces. Children should eat while seated and be under adult supervision.” Thanks for that! And I thought parents should leave a 2-year old alone with a wiener and a six pack.
Child car seats. Bicycle helmets. Safety caps. It’s a wonder my generation made it to adulthood without government intervention. As long as there are lawyers and skinned knees, you can bet we’ll see more.
Justice gets one right – for once
The tide is turning. The justice system, however imperfect, is capable of finding justice.
Tattoo artist Michael Mineo accused a cop of ramming a police baton into him, setting the stage for an ugly trial in Brooklyn. Proving the Blue Wall of Silence is dormant, one of accused Officer Richard Kern’s colleagues testified against him. Still, jurors were troubled by Mineo’s series of apparent lies and his $440 million civil lawsuit against the city. Kern, and two officers accused of covering up for him, this week were found not guilty.
This comes on the heels of the rightful acquittal of three detectives charged in the fatal shooting of Sean Bell, an unarmed man who drunkenly rammed his car into a cop on a murky night in Queens.
Our police do an extraordinary job under excruciating circumstances. The courts are catching on to this.