Irresponsible Rap on FDNY

The Fire Department is being accused of redesigning its training course for new Firefighters in an attempt to disqualify minority candidates while they are still in the Fire Academy.

It's a specious claim, but it is given currency by both a wrongful death suit filed on behalf of the widow of a Probationary Firefighter who died during training and the Vulcan Society, a fraternal group for black firefighters.

At issue is that the training course times candidates in both drills and running exercises, which wasn't done in the past. Vulcan Society President John Coombs said he complained about the change to Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta prior to the death of Jamel Sears after he collapsed during training last November, and he and Mr. Sears' widow, Sherita, both contend it was intended to weed out minority candidates. And Mr. Coombs' predecessor, Capt. Paul Washington, told this newspaper's Ari Paul that he believed the training regimen was "far and above what it needs to be."

The Fire Department has declined to comment on the lawsuit, but one of its spokesmen disputed Mr. Coombs' dubious assertion that the time it takes to complete tasks doesn't matter in firefighting. He also said any claim that the FDNY was attempting to "weed out" minority candidates was "the furthest thing from the truth."

There is good reason to believe that in this case, the department is responding truthfully and that Mr. Coombs is grasping at any possible straw to belittle its efforts to increase minority representation in the firefighting ranks.

Start with the fact that Mr. Sears' class came from a hiring list that contained by far the largest contingent of minority candidates—38 percent. When it completed training in December, 35 percent of the graduates were minorities, easily the highest minority percentage to come on the job in FDNY history.

It was in no small measure a product of the mostextensive and most-effective minority recruitment effort in FDNY history. On the one hand, the Vulcans might argue that the department only took that step because it is facing Justice Department scrutiny resulting from a lawsuit the group brought alleging that the two previous exams given for the job, in 1999 and 2002, were biased against minority candidates. On the other hand, since the Vulcans were offered a role in the recruitment drive and refused to participate, it would seem a bit churlish if they didn't give the FDNY credit for a good-faith effort that produced tangible results.

Yet that is exactly the posture that Mr. Coombs has taken from the time that the strong showing by minority candidates on the exam was disclosed. He said then that he'd hold his celebration until he saw how many of them actually graduated, but when most of them did so, he still dismissed it as insignificant.

The most-controversial element of the latest Firefighter exam was that the physical test was scored on a pass-fail basis rather than ranking candidates in order of their grades. Civil service traditionalists argue that this waters down the results by giving someone who scored a 70 the same chance as someone who scored 100.

The Fire Department has long sworn by rank-order scoring. It is a major reason that firefighting is the least-integrated of the city's uniformed services: the average white candidate is the product of a better education than the average minority candidate, who is typically coming from public schools in poorer city neighborhoods.

This time around, the FDNY took a page from the Police Department, which a quarter-century ago began offering an easier written exam for Police Officer that a city Director of Testing would later testify in court could be passed by "a functional illiterate." The NYPD saw this as a way to get a greater percentage of minority candidates into the Police Academy; once there, it used its more-rigorous academic curriculum to make sure that those who graduated and become cops had the necessary intelligence to perform their jobs well. Even before the mid-1990s requirement that candidates for the job have two years of college, there were few complaints that the grads were not as sharp as their predecessors.

The Fire Department has sought to have the same success while altering the physical training and expanding the time spent in the Fire Academy. There is no evidence that this would work to the disadvantage of minority candidates rather than their white counterparts, or that it actually did make it tougher for them. That includes Mr. Sears, who the Medical Examiner's Office discovered had suffered from atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, a condition that could have proved fatal during any strenuous activity, whether in the training academy, fighting an actual fire, or even away from work.

Whatever racism and unequal treatment has existed in the Fire Department in the past is not added to by the FDNY's most-recent testing and training initiatives. It is perhaps understandable that a grieving widow would point a finger at the department on this matter, but there is no excuse for Mr. Coombs to do so. When he does, it raises questions as to whether he is unwilling to credit the FDNY with reasonable efforts to better integrate the firefighting force while assuring that there is no loss of quality in the ranks.

From our viewpoint, it seems to have succeeded on both counts, and Mr. Sears' tragic death was not a consequence of that effort.

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