URBAN AGENDA: New Mayor Must Hold FDNY’s Feet to the Fire

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The winner of next month’s New York City mayoral election must finish the job of desegregating the New York City Fire Department, ending its nearly 160-year history as a bastion of bigotry and racism in public employment.

The new mayor needs to stand up for what’s right, and take steps to end the belligerence and recalcitrance embraced by the department’s brass and the firefighters’ unions. For years, they have fought tooth and nail against civil rights reforms and racial equality in FDNY’s hiring of uniformed firefighters.

This is no small task. No group in society more than white firefighters symbolizes the institutional resistance to full workplace participation of people of color and women.  FDNY figures show 72 percent of uniformed firefighters are white, 9 percent Black, 15 percent Latinx and 2 percent Asian. Those numbers have changed at a snail’s pace over the last two decades.

Solving the FDNY’s race problem is made even more urgent –– and, quite frankly, more difficult –– by President Donald Trump’s relentless attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). In a shattering setback for communities of color, Trump signed an executive order that outlawed DEI initiatives. He then transformed the acronym into invective that women, people with disabilities and people of color are inherently unqualified.

New York City’s incoming mayor must commit to driving a stake through the heart of the FDNY’s racism that assures the department remains predominantly white. To do so requires a commitment to root out the base causes of the racial blockade.

The FDNY commissioner must have the moral will, and a political mandate from the new administration, to attack the cancer within the department. For decades, people of color and women were made to feel unwelcome because it was assumed non-traditional groups lacked the physical and intellectual tools for success in the profession.

At its core, reform calls for the difficult reframing of the FDNY’s ideal of the muscle-bound, white male firefighter. This will take re-education of both the general public as well as FDNY leadership, mid-level managers and rank-and-file members.

Reorienting the department to create a welcoming environment inside the stationhouses and truly embrace policies that open the door to women and people of color is as vital as inspiring more diversity candidates to take the firefighter examination.

The FDNY race issue is deep seated. Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg apologized for his stop-and-frisk policy, but he fought efforts by the Vulcan Society, a fraternal organization of Black firefighters, to end discriminatory employment tactics.  Bloomberg, his predecessors – Edward Koch, David Dinkins, and Rudolph Giuliani – as well as successors Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams never took steps to firmly address the history of broken promises, lawsuits, consent decrees and settlement payouts caused by the FDNY.

Laura Kavanagh, appointed by Adams as the New York City Fire Department’s first woman commissioner, understood senior management was the nexus of FDNY’s problems. She mounted the most aggressive interdepartmental campaigns to root out overt racism and sexism. She resigned last year under pressure for standing up to the FDNY senior staff.

Uniformed firefighters and the FDNY brass for generations were probably unaware, or know it and just don’t care, how their status-quo perceptions about the firefighting profession reinforce bias and create unequal opportunities for peers from underrepresented groups.

Kavanagh, who is now a member of the Community Service Society of New York’s Board of Trustees, stepped up training, recruiting, hiring and promotion of women and minorities. She made waves by integrating the command staff, a move that went far beyond simply increased recruiting. She named the first African American Emergency Medical Services chief, the first African American female executive officer and the first Latino chief of staff.

Building on Kavanagh’s strategy is more difficult in the era of Trump, who flipped civil rights on its head by exploiting alleged reverse discrimination against white people, particularly white men. His policies, criticized by civil rights advocates, coincide with a surge in Black unemployment to 7.5 percent, double the national average. Nationally, the president’s shenanigan has chilled lawful efforts by major corporations to advance equal employment opportunity.

In the long history of Black firefighters, starting with the hiring of William Nicholson in 1898, there has been progress. The Vulcan Society deserves credit for legal actions that slowly increased the number of Blacks in the FDNY.

The jury is still out, however, on the new recruiting program, “All Heroes Welcome,” created by a package of City Council legislation last year that focused on diverse recruitment, retention, workplace improvements, monitoring and public reporting.

The recent activity are baby steps toward the end game of curing the FDNY’s civil rights problem. A new mayor committed to stamping out resistance could give birth to a new era of equality and diversity in the fire service.

David R. Jones, Esq., is President and CEO of the Community Service Society of New York (CSS), the leading voice on behalf of low-income New Yorkers for more than 175 years. The views expressed in this column are solely those of the writer. The Urban Agenda is available on CSS’s website: www.cssny.org.