[Bret L]

Professor Gates, Officer Crowley, President Obama—And The New York
Fire Department

By Steve Sailer

"Two stubborn individuals have done more than anyone to slow the Obama political juggernaut over the last month-- Frank Ricci and James Crowley.

Ricci, of course, is the New Haven, CT fireman whose June 29th Supreme
Court victory, overturning Sonia Sotomayor’s decision in favor of
cheating him out of his hard-earned promotion, put the damper on her
Senate hearings. Her rebuke by the Supreme Court in Ricci transformed
her hearings from a celebration of the first Latina nominee into a
dismal, hunkered-down exercise in dissimulation and damage control.

And Crowley is the Cambridge, MA policeman who showed the character
and courage that past targets of Two Minute Hates like geneticist
James D. Watson and Harvard President Larry Summers fatally lacked
when Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard African-American Studies
impresario, threw an unprovoked temper tantrum and falsely accused
Crowley of racism.

At Thursday’s press conference, Barack Obama, in a textbook example of
racial prejudice, essentially prejudged the Gates-Crowley
confrontation based only on Gates’ side of the story--plus the
President’s own abundant (but generally better-concealed) personal
resentments about race.

Any white bigshot would have wilted under this double-barreled attack.
But Crowley simply stood his ground. On Friday, Obama blinked first.

Interestingly, both Ricci and Crowley are not the kind of folks the
Republican Party has focused upon representing in the 21st Century.
They are Northeasterners, civil servants, and union men. Indeed, their
unions’ strong opposition to the racial spoils system and to racial
blackmail has been one of the keys to their fortitude.

The Bush Administration systematically worked to alienate men like
Ricci and Crowley, who had worked hard to pass civil service exams.

For example, on May 21, 2007, the Department of Justice filed suit in
the name of Bush crony/Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales charging
the Fire Department of New York (FDNY) with violating the 1964 Civil
Rights Act:

“… the United States alleges that defendant City of New York's use of
two written examinations on a pass-fail basis, as well as its rank-
order processing of applicants, in the screening and selection of
applicants for appointment to the rank of entry-level firefighter, has
resulted in disparate impact upon black and Hispanic applicants, is
not "job related for the position in question and consistent with
business necessity" and does not otherwise meet the requirements of
Title VII.[USDOJ Offical complaint, PDF]

In other words, blacks and Hispanics did worse than whites on the
blind-graded written tests about firefighting given in 1999 and 2002.

That’s it. That’s the extent of the Bush Administration’s evidence for
discrimination by the FDNY.

Now, it is true that the Fire Department of New York is mostly white.
Judging from their pictures, I would estimate that ten African-
American firemen died at the World Trade Center on 9/11, along with
perhaps twelve Hispanics, zero Asians, and 321 white firemen.

Recently, Peter Brimelow has been bugging me a lot about updating my
“Sailer Strategy” analysis of how the Republican Party can cope with
the worsening demographic balance caused in large measure by the lax
immigration policies favored by GOP leaders such as Karl Rove and John
McCain.

Well, Ricci and Crowley are part of the answer. The release of the
2008 Census survey of voters confirmed that Barack Obama motivated
minorities to go to the polls, but that, in contrast, McCain turned
off whites. The Associated Press reported on July 20, 2009:

“For all the attention generated by President Obama's candidacy, the
share of eligible voters who actually cast ballots in November
declined for the first time in a dozen years. The reason: Older whites
with little interest in backing either Barack Obama or Republican Sen.
John McCain stayed home. … Ohio and Pennsylvania were among those
showing declines in white voters, helping Obama carry those
battleground states. “[U.S. vote rate dips in '08, older whites sit
out]

McCain’s teaming up with Ted Kennedy to write the failed 2006 amnesty
bill, and his refusal to mention Obama’s obvious weak points, such as
his support for racial preferences and the $53,770 he donated to Rev.
Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. from 2005-2007, were disastrous.

I’ll write up my Grand Plan to keep America from turning into a one-
party Greater Chicago soon. (I promise!).

But may I suggest, though, that as a tiny first step in forming a
potentially winning coalition, Republicans stop and rethink whether
their President should have attacked the Fire Department of New York
as racist?

Sure, these firemen are highly paid civil servants with a pushy union,
and they’re New Yorkers to boot. But … 343 of them gave their lives on
9/11.

Last Wednesday, July 22, Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis, a Clinton
appointee, gave Bush a belated going-away present by swallowing the
Gonzales Department of Justice allegations wholesale and deeming
FDNY’s 1999 and 2002 paper-and-pencil employment exams discriminatory
against minorities solely on the grounds of Disparate Impact.

Garaufis's opinion is an amusing compendium of the sophistries that
comprise the conventional wisdom of Disparate Impact legal theories.

The judge found the tests discriminatory despite being unable to find
any evidence of actual discrimination. Even John Coombs, the head of
the plaintiff, the black firefighter’s Vulcan Society, couldn’t
identify specific problems. Newsday reported:

“Asked to point out questions he considered discriminatory on the
exam, Coombs said, ‘I'm not going to answer that. It's irrelevant.’ He
added, ‘It's a bad exam when the exam gives you … results that are
abysmal for diversity.’ [Federal judge calls FDNY recruiting exams
discriminatory, By Michael Frazier, July 25, 2009]

Judge Garaufis allowed Coombs’ Vulcans to join the case midway
through. Yet, he banned the main union, the Uniformed Firefighters
Association, from participating even though they argued that New
York’s Bloomberg Administration was too politically ambivalent to
adequately defend firemen’s interests.

Stephen Cassidy, head of the UFA, pointed out:

“Basic intelligence is an important asset for firefighters, and
ignoring that fact will imperil the safety of the firefighting force.
… The job requires not only physical strength, but also an alert and
keen mind. … Firefighters are now extensively trained to deal with
hazardous materials, possible terrorism and environmental issues
unknown years ago. …There is no doubt that intelligence and ability to
read and understand are important traits for firefighters.”

The predictive validity of written tests for performance on jobs much
like firefighting has been documented by many decades of study by the
U.S. military. But the Judge mentions none of this overwhelming
evidence.

Garaufis’s decision in Vulcan may seem bizarre in the wake of Ricci.
But as I've pointed out, it's much easier for the government to
discriminate against whites before they have been hired and get union
and civil service protections.

The Bush Administration’s claim that the test “is not job related for
the position in question” was laughable. Each question is flagrantly
job related. (You can see the 1999 and 2002 tests here.)

Thus Diane Cardwell of the New York Times reported on July 23 in Judge
Finds Racial Bias in Fire Dept. Recruiting:

“New York City used tests that discriminated against black and
Hispanic applicants to the Fire Department and had little relation to
firefighting, a federal judge in Brooklyn ruled on Wednesday.”

Yet, Cardwell’s accompanying feature article in the same issue of the
NYT, Racial Bias in Fire Exams Can Lurk in the Details, included
numerous complaints that the problem with the FDNY test was that it
had too much relation to firefighting:

“… firefighter entrance exams have tended to favor applicants already
steeped in the ways of the job, like ‘people whose dads and uncles are
firefighters,’ said Richard Primus, [Email him]a professor of
constitutional law at the University of Michigan. … Besides, Professor
Primus added, some of that knowledge is not needed to become a good
firefighter. ”… some of it tends to be knowledge that “firefighting
junkies have, even though it is not really necessary for fighting
fires.’”

Those darn “fire buffs” keep studying in their spare time how to save
our lives. It’s discriminatory!

Cardwell’s explanation in the NYT of what’s wrong with the test can
most charitably be read as heavy sarcasm:

“Each exam consists of 85 multiple-choice questions about firefighting
practices: the order in which a firefighter should don gear in an
alarm; what the rear of a building would look like, based on its
facade; the right situations in which to say ‘mayday’ rather than
‘urgent’ over the walkie-talkie.

“Nevertheless, a closer look shows that the exams also required
applicants to read and understand long passages, often containing
technical terms, and then answer questions about them.” [Italics
mine.]

Cardwell complains:

“One question, for instance, follows a 250-word description of the use
and maintenance of portable power saws …”

I’m sorry, but portable power saws, especially the hellacious ones
used by firemen to cut through steel and concrete, come with massive
instruction manuals much longer than 250 words (owing to decades of
product liability lawsuits, as the judge should know).

Why? Because portable power saws can be insanely dangerous. When a
relative of mine was a teenager, for example, his chainsaw hit a nail
buried in a tree and bucked back into his face.

If an applicant can’t make sense of a 250-word text about power saw
maintenance, he might well wind up on lifetime disability.

Let me explain how the FDNY hiring process worked in 1999 and 2002.
(For 2007, even before the Bush Administration sued, the written test
was dumbed down to increase diversity.)

A lengthy, intensive system produced quality firefighters with high
esprit de corps. (John Derbyshire once told me that in his Long Island
neighborhood, blue-collar women consider FDNY guys the most desirable
catches as husbands; they tend to be more stable than the similarly
well-paid NYPD.)

All applicants took the intensive 50+ page written test. (Study guides
were provided beforehand.)

Why start with a written test? They provide a cheap and fair way for
the city to drop the deadwood early in the hiring process. Also, rank-
order hiring based on test scores speeds up the training of the smart
guys who would make good supervisors later in their careers.

For applicants of middling intelligence, those who study firefighting
hardest do best. This weeds out those who are either lazy or not
committed to firefighting as a career. Moreover, encouraging
applicants to study on their own before taking the test gets the
winners through the expensive Fire Academy faster.

Everybody who attained the passing score (which was a large majority
of test-takers) was invited back for a more expensive physical
performance test (sort of like the one that Kevin James failed in his
attempt to become a New Jersey state trooper in the opening scene of
last winter’s hit movie Paul Blart, Mall Cop).

Scores on the written and physical tests were then averaged and the
best performers were called in for medical, psychological, and
background checks. The survivors were invited to enroll in rank order
at New York City’s 27-acre Fire Academy on Randall’s Island.

In 1999, 90 percent of whites, 77 percent of Hispanics, and 60 percent
of blacks scored high enough on the written test to qualify for the
physical test. If you use Excel’s Normdist function, you’ll see that
the white-black gap is a (very standard) one standard deviation. The
pseudonymous statistical analysis La Griffe du Lion has dubbed this
one standard deviation white-black gap the Fundamental Constant of
Sociology. The white-Hispanic gap was 0.54 standard deviations, which
is about normal, too.

In 2002, the passing score was lowered from 85% to 70%, presumably to
get around the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s notoriously
innumerate Four-Fifths Rule. This says that burden of proof is on the
employer to disprove illegal discrimination if the lowest scoring
group doesn’t pass at a rate at least 80 percent as good as the
highest group. That incentivizes employers to lower standards.

Sure enough, the white passing rate to 97 percent, the Hispanic rate
to 93 percent, and the black rate to 85 percent. (Hey, EEOC, 85
percent divided by 97 percent is over Four-Fifths!) Yet the racial
gaps in standard deviations were only a little narrower (white-black
0.85 and white-Hispanic 0.45).

Obviously, a test that only three percent of whites flunked is not a
very hard test. Still, the good news about the FDNY was that it
continued to hire in rank order, so that it got the cream of the crop.
In contrast, Chicago, in its efforts to avoid being charged with
Disparate Impact, has made the fireman’s hiring test so easy that 96
percent of whites pass; and then hiring is done by lottery. (Or, as
cynics have suggested, hiring might be done in order of the
applicant’s number of dead relatives who voted for Mayor Daley in the
last election.)

Disparate Impact theory is a cover story for corruption, incompetence,
and innocent people burning to death.

No wonder the Bush Administration was for it.

No wonder there’s not a McCain Administration.

President Obama’s press conference should have stimulated the
Republicans into waking up to a winning issue.

But, judging by their history with the FDNY, they’ll likely blow it
again."

http://vdare.com/sailer/090726_fdny.htm