A Call for Lawlessness?

Capt. Paul Washington recently commented on the NYPD’s “Stop & Frisk” operations saying, "When the mayor is so happy to give felony convictions through these stop-and-frisks, your chances of getting this job (FDNY firefighter) are even slimmer."

Is Capt Washington actually making the argument that a black person walking down the street with an illegal gun is any less a threat, any less deserving of a felony rap than, say, Marc Ringel, whom police arrested with a veritable arsenal of weapons and marijuana in his parent’s Long Island home? (SEE: http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Police-Marijuana-Greenhouse-Weapons-Arsenal-Long-Island-Marc-Ringel-141768183.html)

 

Is THAT the argument that Capt Washington would make? THAT neither Marc Ringel, nor a black teen walking down a South Bronx street with an illegal weapon deserve felony charges?

REALLY?!

None of that should be surprising considering that Capt. Washington and the FDNY Vulcan Society’s lawsuit against the FDNY’s entrance exam process is based entirely on the very flawed legal construct of “disparate impact.” The very SAME construct that triggered and exacerbated the mortgage meltdown of 2008...a crisis that we're STILL dealing with.

A tremendous amount of harm has been done with “disparate impact.” Through the 1990s many U.S. banks were sued using that construct, by those claiming that, “traditional lending criteria had a disparate and negative impact on low income Americans.” As a result banks were forced to engage in risky “creative financing” and to abandon traditional lending criteria. This helped generate the mortgage meltdown and the subsequent credit crisis we are still dealing with today. “Disparate impact” is NOT new. It’s been around a long time and it’s been used in a lot of cases.

The issue with the FDNY testing lawsuit isn’t the Vulcan Society’s challenging the entry process (it has every legal right to do that), but with the interpretations of a very liberal judge (Nicholas Garaufis) that has looked at a job (FDNY firefighter) that requires a minimum 12^th grade reading level (a H.S. diploma) giving exams set to a 7^th and 8^th grade reading level and finding that even that very LOW standard can be seen as “discriminatory.”

It also fails to look at the city workforce as a whole. The City of NY not only doesn’t have a history of discriminating against black applicants, black applicants are the most OVER-represented group in the city’s workforce and the primary reason why both Asians and Hispanics are so under-represented.

There are just 2 groups over-represented in the NYC public workforce, they are non-Latino blacks and non-Latino-whites. It turns out that non-Latino blacks are the ONLY ethnic group OVER-represented by more than 10% their numbers in NYC’s population.

According to a recent City Lights article, titled “The Whitest City Agencies,” non-Latino whites (35% of the city’s population) comprise 38% of the NYC workforce appx. 8.8% over-represented according to their proportion of the city’s population, while non-Latino blacks (23% of the city’s population) comprise 36% of the NYC workforce, appx. 57% over-represented according to their proportion of the city’s population! (SEE: http://www.citylimits.org/news/articles/4038/the-whitest-city-agencies)

Captain Washington’s own mantra that “The (FDNY) entire NYC workforce should mirror the population of New York City,” amounts to a call against the sizable OVER-representation of non-Latino blacks within New York City’s Municipal workforce.

His charge that the Bloomberg administration’s “Stop and Frisk” operations are racist” appears to amount to nothing less than a call for lawlessness and a call that would render the actions of folks like Marx Ringel non-prosecutable!