Racial Preferences Produce Change, Controversy; Effect on Police and Fire Departments in Many U.S. Communities Has Been Dramatic
In the harsh battleground over jobs, college education and access to the promotion ladder, the issues of quotas and racial preferences can come to dominate, if not supersede, the national struggle to achieve equity in the workplace and on the college campus.</br></br>Take, for example, the core of city government: the police and fire departments. In many communities well into the 1960s, these departments were white male enclaves, controlled by such European ethnic groups as Irish, Italian and Polish Americans.</br></br>The effect of government and civil rights challenges to these institutions has been dramatic: From 1960 to 1989, the number of black patrolmen and detectives grew nationally from 8,500, or 3.7 percent of the total, to 60,400 or 13.1 percent. The number of black firefighters shot up from 2,638 to 22,560, or from 1.9 percent to 12 percent of the total, according to census data.</br></br>The integration of the lower ranks of the nation's police and fire departments - often against forces hostile to change - was achieved at a cost: the use in some cases of hiring procedures that do not strictly follow civil service selection of those who perform best on tests. The failure to follow traditional civil service regulations, however, may be at less variance with merit selection than patronage, old-boy networks and nepotism historically characteristic of city, union and private sector job allocation.</br></br>The use of racial proportions and other techniques to increase the percentage of jobs and promotions going to blacks and Hispanics has forced a number of whites to see these opportunities go to competitors whose raw score ranking on written tests is lower than their own.