In a lacerating decision that accused Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of willfully ignoring the racial imbalance in the city’s Fire Department, a federal judge ruled on Wednesday that a court-appointed monitor would be installed to oversee the department’s recruitment efforts and ensure that more minority candidates are hired.
The decision by the judge, Nicholas G. Garaufis of Federal District Court in Brooklyn, comes at the end of four years of bitter litigation in which the city and the Fire Department stood accused of allowing the department to remain almost 97 percent white for decades. The ruling was remarkable for both its language and its substance. Judge Garaufis accused the city of “blame-shifting” and “accountability-avoidance” in ignoring the Fire Department’s longstanding racial inequities (“The city still doesn’t get it,” he wrote.) He also ruled that the only way to combat this official intransigence was to appoint a monitor with wide-ranging powers and a tenure of at least 10 years.
“The evidence adduced in this case gives the court little hope that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg or any of his senior leadership has any intention of stepping up to the task of ending discrimination at the F.D.N.Y.,” Judge Garaufis wrote. Later in the ruling, he continued: “Instead of facing hard facts and asking hard questions about the city’s abysmal track record of hiring black and Hispanic firefighters, the Bloomberg administration dug in and fought back.”
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