Pursuit of ethnic diversity a contributing factor in Baltimore City FF recruit death

The BBQ Pit
81

Well, King of Poop, you can continue to keep your fingers in your ears and la-la-la away the truth of what has transpired in Baltimore and many other major cities, but those of us in the fire service, career and volunteer, black and white, female and male, who have earned a position know differently.

You wouldn’t want to speak with individuals of color who likewise resent the lowering of standards, because that doesn’t fall in line with your Kool-Aid inspired belief, such as the piece by Mr. Barber which I cited at #13 on the first page.

82

That is . . . astonishing. Considering the city’s population is only 31% white. Which is reflected in the makeup of the city government, IME (I’ve lived there). How did that situation ever arise?

83

Have you even read the thread? It was a one-time thing. Only a small percentage of minorities were able to pass the written test, and of those that did pass it, they were unable to pass background checks or drug testing.
The press got hold of the graduation photo and said, basically, “What’s wrong with this picture?”

As I said a few posts back, when your house is on fire and the fire engine pulls up, are you going to be checking skin color and gender as the firefighters jump off the engine and start pulling hose and hooking up to a hydrant?

84

From what I’ve read, their recruitment method was to have firemen contact people to tell them upcoming tests. The fire department was apparently predominantly white so apparently they tended to recruit other white people. This doesn’t indicate any racism on the part of the individual firemen but it did create a racial imbalance overall. The problem was addressed after 2004 and new procedures were created to get the word about the test out to a wider pool of applicants.

And the death of a recruit was…?

It’s funny how you’re willing to excuse one one-time event but are insisting on a another one-time event indicates a widespread problem.

85

No, that is not the only way that news of upcoming tests get out. It’s announced on the Baltimore City Fire Department website, the Baltimore City website, and by announcements in the paper. All the city firehouses have applications and notices of test dates, too.

You want to be a firefighter? You find out HOW TO BECOME ONE. You go on-line, you go to a firehouse, you ask.

Yes, if you are a volunteer firefighter in one of the surrounding counties, you can find out about upcoming testing dates from a fellow firefighter maybe a few days earlier. It’s not like it’s some huge secret passed around that is kept hidden from the general public.
And yes, people who are already in a volunteer house have an advantage. Because they’re already firefighters! They’ve taken Firefighter One (and maybe classes beyond that), they’ve had some real-world experience, and they know what’s expected.

86

Can you show me this was true prior to 2004? (And I could speculate on what kind of reception a black man gets when he shows up at an all-white fire company and says he like a test application.)

And as long as you’re down there, let me hand you a shovel. What’s your explanation for why all those black applicants either didn’t take the test or failed the test or failed the background check?

87

You and I both know that a website isn’t going to display a line indicating “These contents have been unchanged since 2002”. No one is going to call the Mayor’s office to get a timeline regarding advertisment practices, assuming they could provide one.

You are free to speculate all you like, but gauging by your inference, you’d be wrong. This isn’t Mississippi Burning. Personnel in fire stations consider themselves to be professionals, and comport themselves as such when dealing with the public. Black or white, male or female, the querying party would receive courtesy and their request would be attended to as expeditiously as the member was able. The people in my fire station would give the applicant any paperwork requested and answer any questions posed, if they knew the answer. If they couldn’t answer, they would take the person’s name and phone number, and forward same, along with the question to either me or the Fire Chief, and one of us would return the call within 48-72 hours.

Why didn’t a black applicant take the test? Ask the applicant.
Why did the black applicant fail the test? Lack of preparation, most likely. See my answer above, regarding Civil Service testing prep.
Why did the black applicant fail the background check? This one’s a stumper, but I’m gonna take a wild guess that it’s because they were convicted of a violation of some law in Maryland, or elsewhere.

It’s also worthy of note that you can substitute white for black in any of the above questions. No doubt some white applicants didn’t pass the test, for the same reasons, and failed the background check, for the same reasons.

88

Why Dances, you amaze me. King of Poop? It took a team of four-year-olds almost three minutes to come up with that epithet, given the original. You did it in less than two days. The courage which an intellect of that caliber must summon in order to champion any sort of written standardized test can only be characterized as admirable.

I must confess to the infrequent plugging of my ears, which provides relief from the ever-louder keyboard-pounding of a man (?), to whom facts and reason have yet again turned traitor, retreating to a comfortable redoubt composed of walls of irrational shrillness.

My eyes are wide open, however, to any possible (though at this point, sadly belated) connection between the pursuit of ethnic diversity and recruit Wilson’s death. And still, (as for which the brief study of the OP’s character and tactics that the thread provides hath prepared us) it does not come.

–No proof that the test changes benefitted certain ethnicities at the expense of others;

–No proof that the test changes were responsible for an admitted or retained recruit Wilson;

–No proof that Wilson’s shortcomings were tolerated because of any preference for her ethnicity (and one more time, with feeling: what kind of a test writer decides to bias the test in favor of black Americans by weakening the physical strength and agility requirements?) rather than a bias for other groups whose faults her weaknesses happened to mimic;

–No proof that any of these, should they magically appear, explain Wilson’s death better than any of the other forty-nine fuck-ups in the exercise that killed her;

–No proof, given the horribly mismanaged abortion of what should have been a straightforward exercise, that the leadership of the BCFD, presumably not the product of soft-hearted ideas about racial equality, should not be an indictment of the entire fire department and it’s prior admissions process.

Finally, Dances horrifies us with the hint that he (?) actually made the cut as a fireman himself. Lord knows I’ve learned better than to ask him for proof that would satisfy anyone – it would likely be futile. But, further, I won’t ask because of the risk that this sentence might be true, and that would be too depressing.

A tragedy occurs, and fifty reasons that it happened are found. Dunces uses this finding to prove that a fifty-first, the goal of ethnic diversity, is to blame instead. Blaming it on space aliens would be as plausible, but the OP has no agenda against monsters from another world.

89

Did you read the thread title? It was the pursuit of ‘ethnic diversity’ that was a contributing factor in the FF recruit’s death. It wasn’t the only factor; it was noted in the very first post that there were numerous screw-ups at the scene of the practice exercise.
The push for ethnic diversity within the FD was what got Racheal Wilson in the academy. Her physical condition should have excluded her. Her failure at the agility admissions test should have excluded her. Her propensity for removing her face piece and panicking at times of stress should have gotten her kicked out.
During the fatal incident, others were able to remove themselves from the situation (climbing out a window), and she was unable to do so, even with help.
She had no place being there.

90

Apparently the firemen I know are a lot different than the firemen you know. The firemen I know are like policemen or soldiers - they believe in group loyalty and how you have to trust your teammates literally with your life. The good side of this is their intense loyalty for each other and their willingness to risk their lives in service to others. But the bad side of this is that this attitude breeds a distrust of outsiders - which in all too many cases can turn into an attitude of distrusting people who are different. My experience has been that if these groups are forced to accept new people they will quickly learn that they’re capable and will embrace them as part of the team - but they will still need to be pushed in over loud objections at the beginning.

91

Did you even read what he wrote? (How many times have I said that in this thread?)
If someone inquired at a firehouse about applications, they would receive courtesy and respect and get their inquiry handled as quickly as possible. That’s the way it would be at my firehouse, also. Applications are not out for everyone to handle, but the name and number of the person who wanted one would be given to the appropriate member (the Recruitment and Retention Committee) as soon as possible.

And I know lots of firefighters, both career and volunteer. Yes, they believe in teamwork and backing each other up. This is something that is taught and reinforced all through class and practical exercises, and in real-life experiences. Everyone has a job, and they have to do that job. Not everyone gets to hold the hose. Some people have to drag hoseline and hook up to the hydrant. Some people wait till the fire’s out and then go in and do salvage and overhaul. Sometimes all you get to do is direct traffic.
It’s put into practice even more so on the EMS side. You have to work as a team with your partner. You have to learn to anticipate each other’s moves.

I’ve never seen an overall attitude of distrusting outsiders.

92

No-the people I know are no different. We’ve already been exposed to and have admitted females and minorities. We accept them, so long as they meet the standard. New recruits are sent to county fire school, where they are expected to attend classes and pass the final written and practical exam. Candidates coming from another department have their credentials checked, and given that most examining facilitites test to a national standard, they are accepted as though they had tested here.

93

Yes I did.

94

You’re the party who first chose to insult another by name alteration. If you dislike it, then don’t engage.

You’d do well to take a cue from Little Nemo. Although the gentleman and I apparently agree to disagree, he’s not being intentionally obtuse, nor is he being a jerk, for which I respect the man.

On the other hand, your posts are rife with linguistic excess, in a feeble attempt to demonstrate that you’re intellectually my superior, which you have (a) failed to show, and (b) wouldn’t be in any way, shape, or form germane to the thread.

Go back to the basement with your thesaurus, lad. The adults are conversing.

95

Like it? I love it. Why wouldn’t I? So far, you’re losing badly. But it is childish, so I’ll give it up, though it pains me because relinquishing childish games puts you at such a disadvantage.

I don’t know Little Nemo, but the fact that s/he manages to be polite in the face of ignorant bigotry, while admirable, isn’t exactly binding on me. To be honest, I can easily do without the taint of being respected as a gentleman by the likes of you.

Meanwhile, neither you nor Bibliocat (who chastises me for not reading the thread but seems actually to wish I hadn’t read through the sources presented as evidence) wants to answer the central objections, which have been presented, well, often enough without response. For example, how exactly did a change in written test and background check benefit overweight candidates, again? Oh, never mind.

I can do without the title of “intellectually superior to danceswithcats” – it would be an embarrassment to be thought to have sought it. I put away my thesaurus long ago: I know too many words as it is.

The fact is, dunce, that your arguments make honest people puke and smart people laugh. When you encounter smart, honest people, they tend to do both and choke. This phenomenon is what you have been misinterpreting as “winning the argument.”

96

Please. You might keep up the argument that it was ethnic diversity that led to this woman’s death.

You might even keep writing these dewey eyed posts that imply that firefighters are paragons of professional integrity far beyond the racism that might bring down lesser men.

But, as a word of advice, don’t turn this into a “I’m smarter (or more mature) than The King of Soup.” That one won’t end well.

Please do help me to understand what makes the difference between the automatic tearful respect we should give to our firefighters, versus the ability to degrade this woman and mother of two who died while trying to become a firefighter. Why doesn’t she deserve at least enough respect to avoid impugning her integrity and motivation, to say the least of calling her a tub of goo?

What kind of a man does that?

And why should she, on the most dubious of grounds, serve your political purposes of calling ethnic diversity into question?

97

I never called her that; I never degraded her memory, other than to say she was overweight and out-of-shape. It was Trunk who called her a “tub of goo.”

The Pitting is not Cadet Wilson - it’s the Baltimore City Fire Academy, which lowered its admittance standards, and in this case completely disregarded them. Cadet Wilson DID NOT PASS the agility portion of the entrance exam, yet was allowed in anyway. She took it twice, and actually performed worse the second time, which means her physical condition had deteriorated.
She showed a tendency to violate safety standards, yet was allowed to stay in class. She was unable to perform basic tasks, such as holding a hoseline, yet was allowed to stay in class.
Whose fault is that? The leaders at the Academy, not Cadet Wilson’s. It was their quest for an ethnically diverse class that was a contributing factor in her death. There were other screw-ups; that much is true. But Cadet Wilson should not have been there in the first place, and should have been removed from class after it became evident that she was having so much trouble.

98

And after all these days, we have still been shown not a single iota of evidence that it was a desire for ethnic diversity that let her in or allowed her to stay.

I can think of multiple reasons why she was permitted to stay in the program, but every one of them requires some human being to ignore actual regulations. No evidence has been porovided that the physical standards have been lowered, even though explicit claims regarding the written tests and background checks have been asserted. As long as every question regarding her placement is met with “ethnic diversity” without a single scrap of evidence that it actually played a part, you folks are going to continue to be beaten upon. I asked (fairly politely for the Pit) way back at the beginning of this trainwreck who was the person who did not throw her out?

Her presence might have been the result of a desire for ethnic diversity. OR, it might have been due to someone receiving money or someone falling for a sob story that she needed the job or an exchange of some commodity other than money. None of those scenarios require a bias toward racial diversity.

The decision might have been made at the class level or at the department level or at the municipal level. Without that information, all this is speculation.

Has no newspaper or TV station scanned the training roster to see whether a disproportionate number of black applicants are overweight? Was she the only out-of-shape trainee? (If so, that raises a number of other issues.) If she was not the only trainee out of shape, what are the racial proportions of the out-of-shape candidates? Surely these numbers can’t be all that secret–any local news group could walk down to the gate on the first or last day of class and count the bodies, sorted by weight and race.

I have never claimed that racial preferences could not be at the base of the issue, but after all this time, no one has presented any evidence beyond explicit claims for written tests and background checks–neither of which have anything to do with physical stamina.

::: shrug :::

99

Tell you what, Tom. Since you’ve been asking questions and hinting that the answers can’t be that tough to find, why don’t you provide them? Were I a news person, I’d have checked into this further to prove my point, as stated long ago.

Please show proof that the recruit class of which Racheal Wilson was a member consisted of only the top scorers in the written exam, that all of those persons successfully passed the physical agility test, and were free of prior criminal convictions above motor vehicle violations. Offer side by side for comparison the hiring standards present in 2004 and those of 2007, showing them to be identical.

I don’t believe you’ll be any more successful than I’ve been in ferreting out that information, but you may have avenues of which I’m not aware. Go for it.

100

tom didn’t start a thread with the intent to blame a point of speculation on a specific tragedy.

You did.

Thus, between the two of you, only you should be looking for evidence to support your claims.

It says a lot that investigators found that the fire department screwed up in about 50 different ways which led to the recruits death. And yet–because you can’t be bothered to face those facts–you rant about the one factor (racial Affirmative Action) that was not shown to be causative or at play. And is it a coincidence that this one factor rather conveniently paints the fire department in a sympathetic, Jesse Jackson-brow-beaten light, while the other 50-some odd reasons indicate negligence and incompetence? I don’t think it is a coincidence at all.