Bloomberg Upset at Ruling Against Decades of FDNY Racial Hiring Bias

A federal judge in Brooklyn, New York, today, Wednesday, October 5, 2011, ruled that improved recruitment will not be sufficient to overcome decades of racial bias for white men and against black and Latino job candidates. U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis ruled that there will be court monitoring to ensure that hiring is more diverse.

From Reuters, , "Court to keep tabs on New York City fire department hiring":

U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis, who last week identified "areas of concern and room for improvement" in how the city recruits minority candidates for its fire department, followed up Wednesday with a broad but open-ended draft remedial order that calls on New York City to make a top-to-bottom reassessment of how it handles racial issues in how it recruits, hires and employs black and Hispanic firefighters.

The judge faulted New York City Mayor, Michael Bloomberg's leadership on the issue of Fire Department of New York diversity, ( from the New York Daily News:

While issuing the order, Brooklyn Federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis slammed Mayor Bloomberg and his team for ignoring a mountain of evidence showing discriminatory hiring practices for years.

"Though the city's use of discriminatory hiring practices has persisted through numerous changes in city leadership, the evidence adduced in this case gives the court little hope that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg or any of his senior leadership has any intention of stepping up to the task of ending discrimination in the FDNY," Garaufis wrote.

Mayor Bloomberg, always the grumpy contrarian curmudgeon, expressed his displeasure with the federal court ruling, from the Daily News, "Mayor Bloomberg slammed by judge for ignoring years of discrimination in FDNY hiring practices"

"The judge was not elected to run the city, and you can rest assured that we'll be in court for a long time," Bloomberg shot back.

The city's and Mayor Bloomberg's contemptuousness about the issue of racial diversity parallels the pattern of the disappearing black and Latino teacher (in the NYC Department of Education) that Sean Ahern has written about.