Firefighters accused of racial slurs
Officials in Chicago call for probes, firings
CHICAGO -- The city's mayor and aldermen are calling for swift investigations and firings amid repeated disclosures over the past month that firefighters here have used department radios to spout racial slurs over open frequencies.
The incidents have proved a major embarrassment for Fire Commissioner James Joyce and have dredged up a history of discrimination and racial strife in a department that remains predominantly white despite statistics showing the city is roughly 60 percent black and Hispanic.
Joyce, testifying before a City Council committee last week, said there have been five incidents in which slurs, including repeated use of a derogatory term for African-Americans, were heard on the radio since Feb. 2. The most recent incidents -- reportedly including a comment about black members of the City Council -- happened Tuesday and the morning of Wednesday, he said.
Meanwhile, an alderman who was outspoken about the racial epithets and the department's need to bring quick and serious sanctions, reported getting several threatening phone messages that were filled with racist language and questioned the intelligence of black firefighters. The alderwoman, Emma Mitts, said she suspects the caller, a man, was a firefighter.
And there were reports that a 22-year veteran of the department maintained an unofficial Fire Department website on which a number of firefighters had posted racial messages, including references to firehouses in minority neighborhoods as "ghetto houses" and a quick how-to guide for anyone looking to transmit a message over the radio without being caught.
The rash of slurs has infuriated Mayor Richard M. Daley, who said any firefighter found responsible for making the comments should be dismissed.
"If he doesn't like being a fireman, he can quit," Daley said when questioned about one of the incidents. "If he doesn't like people of different races or colors or religious or ethnic origin, he should quit."
Joyce was just as adamant, telling the council's Police and Fire Committee, "I consider this so serious I'm putting the department on notice that offenses like these will be fireable offenses."
Captain Ezra McCann, a black activist within the department and a frequent critic of its leadership, said the spate of slurs is simply a reflection of a segregated city and a department that has stubbornly refused to diversify.
"The average white fireman on the department hasn't had the luxury of working with a black firefighter," he said. "We're the most polarized city in the country. We're split up. We don't live together as neighbors. It's the same thing that exists in the Fire Department."
The first incident occurred Feb. 2 when a firefighter, unaware that he was broadcasting, used a racial slur against a black motorist in an apparent traffic altercation. A second incident followed on Feb. 26, then another on March 1 in which the firefighter targeted a list of ethnic groups. The fourth and fifth incidents occurred last week.
Fire officials were able to trace the first broadcast and suspended the firefighter for 90 days and transferred him out of the predominantly black firehouse where he worked. His supervisor was suspended for 30 days. "It just shows a total lack of respect for the black community," said Alderman Ed Smith, who is black. "It's not all of the white firemen. It's just some of the white firemen who feel this is still 1863."
Smith warned there could be a serious backlash from poor black residents who feel cheated in the level of fire service in their communities and maligned by Fire Department employees.
Furious as Daley and other city officials were about the recent incidents, they also had to contend with questions about the department's history as a hotbed of racial strife. Alderman Isaac Carothers, chairman of the city's Police and Fire Committee, said the answer may be greater diversity in the Fire Department. Of the city's 4,900 firefighters, 3,370 -- nearly 70 percent -- are white, 950 are black, and 510 are Hispanic, according to Chief Dennis Gault, a Fire Department spokesman.
"I'm offended by it but not to the point where I'm outraged, because I know racism exists," said Carothers, who is black. "I'm not surprised that there are people who are racists and bigots on the Fire Department. Racism is alive and well in America."
The city admitted as much in federal court in 1997, saying the department had a long history of "deliberate, invidious discrimination." The admission was made as proof that the city needed to keep in place a controversial affirmative action program that critics said cheated more qualified personnel out of promotions. (A similar affirmative action policy in Boston was ruled illegal last March in a case involving five white applicants who were passed over for jobs.)
In 1998, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that Chicago continued to discriminate in the hiring and promotion of firefighters and that the city's affirmative action efforts had "utterly failed." The following year, a report commissioned by the city found pervasive racial problems in the department.
The embarrassment for the department was especially high after the release in 1997 of a video of a drunken firehouse party several years earlier in which firefighters were captured exposing themselves and making racist remarks.
Among those in attendance was James McNally, the current head of the firefighters' union who once appeared in blackface to protest affirmative action policies.
"Obviously, we don't condone that or the use of slurs of that nature," McNally said, referring to the offenders as "idiots."
But he defended the department's record. "I think the people who are doing this -- I don't know what the hell their motivation is -- are certainly not representative of the Fire Department and what we do every day." 