There are 515 firefighters in Rochester.
Thirty are black, 31 are Latino, and 7 are women. That means 447 of Rochester’s
firefighters— about 90 percent — are white men.
And that, says Ernest Flagler, needs to change. “Most of the
time when we come off that truck, we see people that look like us,” says
Flagler, president of the Genesis chapter of the International Association of
Black Professional Firefighters. People, he says, tend to trust those who
resemble them.
If diversity in the city’s fire department won’t occur
naturally, says Flagler, maybe it’s time to force a change. United under the
slogan “Keep the fire burning for justice,” Genesis members are calling for an
overhaul of the fire department’s employment policies. Their demands include
introducing a quota system into hiring and promotional exams, increasing
recruitment to attract more Rochester residents, and maintaining residency
requirements.
Standing in the way, however,
is the civil service exam. All firefighters must pass this test to become eligible
for the fire service. Applicants are then considered according to their exam
score.
Because the exam process is state controlled, only
municipalities that have received a variance can bypass the exam requirement.
For example, Rochester’s fire department runs a Firefighter Trainee Program at
East High School. Students who complete that program don’t have to take the
civil service exam but can move into the second stage of the hiring process,
which includes a physical agility test, a psychological test, and a background
check.
But Flagler and his colleagues want more: They want a quota
system requiring the city to hire a certain percentage of minority applicants.
That, however, would violate the law.
So Genesis wants the city to pursue a system similar to the
Rochester Police Department’s. For more than 30 years, the RPD has operated
under a federal consent decree establishing the ratio of minority new hires to
non-minority.
Fire Chief Floyd Madison agrees that a consent decree would
be the best way to guarantee diversity in the fire department. About a quarter
of the workforce in both the RPD and the Buffalo fire department, which has
also operated under a consent decree since the 1970’s, are minorities, he says.
New York City’s fire department, which has minority rates as low as
Rochester’s, is pursuing a decree of its own. “The consent decree would be the
way to go because simply it’s legal,” Madison says.
In essence, the consent decree would enable a minority
applicant who scored in the 75th percentile on the civil service exam to be
hired before a white applicant who scored much higher. There are those,
acknowledges Madison, who believe such a system would lower standards. But he
bristles at the suggestion: “Because you wrote a 100 or 90 does not make you
any better than kids who wrote 80.” A written test, he adds, can’t measure
one’s ability to handle life-or-death situations.
A consent decree comes
with its own challenges, however. In fact, the police department has had to
seek a variance from its consent decree when it failed to recruit enough
minority applicants to fill its quota. And a costly legal battle might take
money away from other diversity initiatives, such as recruitment efforts.
It is possible, says Madison,
that the RPD’s decree could be amended to include the fire department. Deputy
Mayor Patty Malgieri says the city is researching that option.
A possible alternative, says Madison,
is eliminating the state exam. The city does not have to use the state exam, he
says, as long as the exam it uses adheres to civil-service guidelines. Madison
wants the city to hire a consultant who has created exams for other
municipalities.
The issue, says Madison,
is not that most minorities fail the civil service exam. Rather, he says, it’s
that minorities’ scores tend to fall in the 80 range, well below the score
needed to get into the competitive firefighting field. In Rochester, when the
exam was last offered in 2003, more than 550 applicants passed. The fire
department, however, hires only around 15 to 20 firefighters every year,
Madison says. Under civil service guidelines, the new hires are all drawn from
the top of the list.
A new exam, says Madison,
would do more than test an applicant’s ability to fill in the dots.
Consultants, he says, typically use both a written and oral exam, which might
help some minorities receive higher cumulative scores.
Madison also
says the city is losing minority applicants during the four months it takes for
the state to score the civil service exam. Using a consultant could shorten
that time, he says, because exams wouldn’t have to be shipped and processed
elsewhere. Madison would also like to offer the exam more often.
But minorities cannot
be treated as a single entity, Madison says. For example, during Madison’s
seven-year tenure as Rochester’s fire chief, the number of women and blacks in
the force has been static, while the number of Latinos has doubled. That means
that any change to the system requires evaluating each minority group
differently, Madison says. This gets complicated, he says, when different
recruitment practices contradict each other.
A case in point: When the civil-service exam was last
offered three years ago, city officials made it harder for non-city residents
to become firefighters. Previously, applicants were given a grace period to
move into Rochester. After 2003 only those already living in the city were
contacted for the next stage of the hiring process.
The good news, says Madison,
is that in the past three years, the city has made it much farther down the
applicant list than in previous years. Applicants are numbered in the order in
which they score on the civil-service exam. The city has now managed to reach
applicant number 420, who is more likely to be a racial minority than those
with, say, applicant number 113.
The bad news, though, is this: “We still have not been able
to attract the female candidates in the numbers that we would like,” Madison
says. That’s because most female applicants typically live outside the city.
So now Madison
is considering eliminating the residency requirement and recruiting nationwide.
That way, he says, he could recruit at minority job fairs and colleges.
But Genesis members say that will take jobs away from city
residents. The issue isn’t that Rochester women aren’t interested in becoming
firefighters, says Flagler; it’s that the city isn’t putting enough money into
local recruitment efforts. So one of Genesis’s more immediate demands is that
the mayor amend the proposed 2006-07 budget to include money for recruiters.
The police department receives funding for recruiters, Flagler says. So should
the fire department.
In the long run, says Flagler, Genesis would also like every
city resident to receive an extra 3 to 5 points on the civil service exam — a
move that would require state approval. “New York City has that law,” he says.
“They grant city residents five points. They’re the only city in New York State
that does that.”
Genesis members also say that minorities deserve bothequal hiring opportunities and equal
promotional ones. The fire department offers a lieutenant’s exam every two
years. And as with the civil service exam, most of the people scoring highest
on the test are white.
Overhauling the entire system, say Genesis members, will
take time, and a great deal of cooperation. Not to mention money. But the goal,
says Flagler, is simple: “We need to get more minorities on the job.”
This article appears in Jun 14-20, 2006.
