Garbanzo Toons

More Racial Discrimination

According to this article
(which is a week old already)

NEW YORK — The city has discriminated against minorities in its hiring of firefighters, causing blacks and Hispanics to comprise only 10 percent of the fire department's work force even though most city residents are minorities, a judge ruled Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis agreed with the U.S. Department of Justice and a fraternal order of black firefighters in finding disparities among those taking firefighter recruitment exams in 1999 and 2002 were so wide that no trial was needed to rule against the city.

There you have it. No trial was needed. New York City is not even guilty until proven innocent, they are simply guilty - no show trial needed. Even Hamas gives accused "collaborators" trials before they murder - uh - I mean execute them.

He said the city used the exams to appoint more than 5,300 entry-level firefighters between 1999 and 2007, cheating at least 1,000 minority firefighters of chances to join a force of roughly 11,000 at the Fire Department of New York.

He said 3,100 exam candidates were black and 4,200 were Hispanic but the city appointed only 184 black firefighters and 461 Hispanic firefighters.

The judge said black and Hispanic applicants had disproportionately failed the written examinations and those who passed were placed disproportionately lower down the hiring lists than whites. He said he must now consider remedies.

Of course, we are not told anything about the scores of any of the applicants, only that there were disproportionate failure rates. Were their also disproportionate study rates before the test? Were there disproportionate intelligence rates? reading skill rates? comprehension rates? ability rates? What about Jewish firefighters? Is there the proper representation of my people in the NYC fire department? How about fire fighters of Chinese, Japanese, Carribean, and other racial/ethnic/minority groups? Gay fire fighters? Or are they all in San Francisco? I demand to know. There must be more accusations. No trials though. Things run much smoother and faster without them.

As always, there's more. And if you are interested in diversity over competency, there will always be discrepencies in representation. And the weight of guilt will always fall on the municipality for not "doing more to recruit minorities" whether they want the job or not. Will blacks and hispanics be shanghied and forced to study for the fireman's exam?

Forgive me for being an insensitive bigot, but I'd rather have a fire department that was proficient at rescuing people from fires. I'm not really interested in their ethnicity. And I'm not convinced that anyone will refuse being rescued because their rescuer is not of the approved minority. If I'm wrong, I hope somebody will correct me.

UPDATE: I added the link to the article.

Labels: Affirmative Action

posted by Harry @ 3:20 PM