Posted on 04/08/2002 8:16:23 PM PDT by Pharmboy
Apr 8, 2002
LOS ANGELES (AP) - A federal judge on Monday threw out a 28-year-old quota system for hiring city firefighters, saying it had "outlasted its purpose." The system, part of a consent decree entered into by the city and the U.S. Department of Justice, was created in 1974 to diversify a fire department that was about 90 percent white.
U.S. District Judge Harry L. Hupp granted the city's request to terminate the consent decree. The city filed the request after rejected white applicants challenged its provisions.
"I think it's beneficial to anybody who believes applicants should be judged on their merits and not their race," said Manuel Klausner, an attorney for the four applicants who challenged the quotas.
Battalion Chief Bob Franco said blacks, Hispanics and Asians made up only about 10 percent of firefighters in 1975, but now constitute nearly 50 percent of the work force.
"It's been about four or five years now that we've reached our goals as far as diversity within the department," he said. The aim is for the department to be as diverse as the city, he said.
After offering jobs to the top scorers, the department has focused on hiring the best applicants in any underrepresented ethnic groups, Franco said. But he added that recently, the department has found acceptably diverse crops of new hires simply by picking the best applicants.
In his ruling, Hupp wrote the consent decree "has outlasted its purpose and is now obsolete, even if legitimate under current standards of law."
Department of Justice officials had supported terminating the consent decree, but had asked Hupp to keep an element of it that would have allowed them to review the qualification exam for firefighters. Hupp denied that request.
Hupp declined to rule on the constitutionality of the consent decree, saying that ending the agreement makes the issue moot.
Californians rejected racial preferences in state and local government when they passed Proposition 209 in 1996, but that law did not affect court orders and consent decrees already in place.
The firefighter case began with a lawsuit by David Alexander, who was prevented from taking the exam in 1994 because he is white and was rejected in 1999 because he did not live in the city of Los Angeles. Three other spurned applicants later joined him.
Last year the city and the Justice Department agreed to remove the residency requirement from the consent decree.
Alexander now works for the Fire Department. City officials said some of the other plaintiffs will be reconsidered.
That right there is enough to get you sued by the ACLU. Notice that these clowns could never get what they want through an honest vote of the people. Oh no, they get what they want through abuse of a legal system that has to sit and split hairs and figure out what "is" is (and goofy activist judges help). The whole thing is wack.
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