FDNY boosts efforts to recruit minorities

But City Councilman Dan Halloran (R-Whitestone), whose brother is a firefighter, called the figures “utterly meaningless,” because it is not yet known how many of those applicants will actually pass the exam.

But the judge contends that under the law, more minorities must pass for the test to be valid, and has ordered the city to come up with a remedy or he will impose one.

He also said he didn’t think the previous tests discriminated against minorities. The lawmaker believes that anyone who studies hard and meets the physical requirements is capable of getting hired.

“No matter how you slice it, it results in hiring quotas,” Halloran said. “It’s unconstitutional to raise one person above another based on ethnicity.”

Paul Mannix, an FDNY deputy chief with Division 6 in the Bronx, who heads Merit Matters, a group that opposes race-based hiring, expressed similar sentiments.

“If they recruit everyone, that’s great. My concern is that it will translate into pressure to hold those numbers up,” said Mannix, who does not speak for the FDNY. The deputy chief fears that if the next exam doesn’t yield what Garaufis considers a racially diverse pool, he will throw it out, just as he has done with the last two tests.

FDNY firefighters have been to more than 6,500 locations throughout the city in the last year, encouraging people to apply. One of the those locations has been the district office of City Councilman Leroy Comrie (D-St. Albans), where recruiters have been stationed every Monday and Tuesday during the last two months. Over 75 southeast Queens residents signed up, the lawmaker said.

“Oftentimes, the recruiters were able to engage our youth about the benefits of public service in the FDNY just by being visible at a recruitment table stationed on the sidewalk in front of my Farmers Boulevard office,” Comrie said in a prepared statement. “With the use of social networking and advertisements, word spread in the community and we saw parents bringing in groups of young men to sign up.”

The filing period for the new exam began on July 15 and ended on Sept. 15. It will be administered in January and February.

“The numbers are good, but we want to make them better,” Fire Commissioner Salvatore Cassano said of the increase in minority applicants while at an event in Harlem where individuals were signing up for the exam.

However, despite minority recruitment efforts going back to 1994, the FDNY is still approximately 87 percent white, according to Comrie. In an effort to increase diversity among the ranks, the lawmaker introduced a bill that would give five additional exam points to applicants with a New York City high school diploma or GED, replacing the old residency credit.

The current racial minority composition of the FDNY is 3.8 percent black, 7.8 percent Hispanic and less than 1 percent Asian, according to Comrie. He noted that those numbers do not accurately reflect the racial composition of the city, which according to the last available U.S. Census data had a population that is approximately 27 percent black, 27 percent Hispanic and 10 percent Asian, the lawmaker said.