AFFIRMATIVE ACTION FOR POLICE/FIRE/EMT RESCUE

[MasterWolf1]

I was reading an article I thought was interesting and yet important to bring up.  Affirmative action in jobs that require rescue and high stress. And doing recruits from former gang members and can you imagine this.. If you need a police officer cause some black gang animal robbed you or try to kill you at one time was a gang animal himself.  Can you imagine if your house or building that you work was on fire and the fire fighter was an affirmative action gang animal you may as well be burned to the ground with the building? Can you imagine if you have a heart attack and you need paramedics and the one that suppose to rescue you was a gang animal that would of killed you before he was recruited?  We continue to lower standards to try to improve self esteme on animals.


http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/9814/features-shapiro.php

[Hail Columbia]

I wonder if the people who support affirmative action wouldn't mind having surgery performed on them by an affirmative action doctor.  If they object to that, then they're damn hypocrites.

[fjack]

The police and fire dept. can recruit from these bunch of newcomers.

Kakuma, Kenya—They had learned how to buy bus tokens and clip coupons. Gotten hands-on training for lighting a gas stove and flushing a toilet. Taken a pop quiz on women’s rights.
But for a group of U.S.-bound Somalian immigrants taking a three-day crash course on life in America recently, one topic by far stirred the most buzz: snow.
Staring at pictures of snow-covered roofs and hearing stories about waking up to find a frontyard covered in white, the Somalis (who’d rarely felt temperatures below 60 degrees) peppered the instructor with questions.
“How do I save my family from this … snow?” asked Hassan Mohammed Abrone, 41, a father of two who was already trying to embrace the American lifestyle by wearing a Statue of Liberty baseball cap and a pair of secondhand Nike Airs.
After hearing a description of coats, scarves, gloves and long underwear, another student, Lelya Yussuf, 23, asked: “How can we walk while wearing all that? Isn’t it too heavy?” In an effort to explain snow to people who have never seen it, the instructor asked students to imagine how it would feel to live inside a refrigerator. But the analogy fell flat for some, because they’d never heard of such an appliance.
“This job takes a lot of patience,” instructor Abdullahinur Sheik Kassim said. “You can’t take anything for granted.”
For the Somalis in this northern Kenya refugee camp, passing a class in America 101 is the final hurdle to boarding airplanes for new lives. As they fly toward the United States, they will learn for the first time where their new homes will be.
A speed-read through American culture, the U.S.-mandated class tries to prepare them for what they will find when they arrive. It covers everything from mini-malls and microwaves to same-sex marriage.
{snip}
The cultural orientation class is one of hundreds given each year in Africa by the International Organization for Migration, or IOM, one of the world’s largest refugee-assistance groups, which organizes the class with funding from the U.S. State Department.
Such programs began in the 1970s for Southeast Asian refugees heading to the United States. Back then, immigrants spent months at transition camps, learning the English language and American customs before entering the country. Over the years, budget cuts have pruned the orientation program to less than a week.
“In just three days, there is not a lot that we can realistically do,” said Pindie Stephen, the group’s regional coordinator for the classes in Kenya. “All we can do is plant the seeds of values and concepts they will encounter later. And we try to dispel myths, because so much of what they learn is from the rumor mill.”
Refugees often believe that life in the U.S. will be easy, that they will live in big homes with cars and television sets. Such descriptions come from relatives in America who sometimes exaggerate their prosperity, or from the U.S.-made TV movies occasionally shown inside refugee camps.
“I know all about America,” said Amal Nuradia, 27. “I’ve seen the Hallmark Channel.” She is among the thousands of Somalian refugees at Kakuma, most of whom fled their country more than a decade ago. More than 12,000 have resettled in the U.S. in recent years.
“What do you know about America?” Kassim asked at the beginning of a recent orientation class. Students yelled out their answers: It’s a superpower. People are always in a hurry. Neighbors don’t talk to each other. Dogs are treated like people. Gay people get married. All children go to school.
With only 15 hours of class, Kassim wasted no time, covering U.S. history in less than 90 seconds. George Washington was the first president. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. Martin Luther King Jr. marched for civil rights. Time for the next subject.
Much of the curriculum is based on feedback from recent immigrants. For example, when new immigrants complained about being bewildered by the modern conveniences of a typical American home, IOM built a fully functioning kitchen and bathroom at the back of one classroom. Long flights to the U.S. were so traumatic that a video was added about airplanes, from lavatories to airsickness bags.
Somalian Bantu, who were historically treated like slaves by other groups and lived in mud huts in the bush without water or electricity, usually know little of modern society, needing instruction on such basic tasks as flipping light switches or turning doorknobs. Other students are from more developed urban centers, such as Mogadishu, the Somalian capital, but even they have limited exposure to sights such as skyscrapers, freeways or elevators, and their children have been largely raised on the run or inside refugee camps.
Sensing the students’ anxiety about snow, Kassim spent the next hour explaining U.S. weather. In their textbooks, students read about the importance of punctuality and Americans’ “obsession” with cleanliness.
Of the 25 students, only one spoke English, so Kassim practiced some key English phrases.
“Po-LEESE! Po-LEESE!” the students recited in unison, practicing a 911 call.
Coming from a country without government or law, the idea that help is only a phone call away amazed Yussuf, whose parents were killed and who is traveling to the U.S. alone. “So if anyone bothers me, I just call 911 and the police come and beat them?” she asked. “Life must be very easy.”
Immigrants also heard about U.S. laws. Beating your wife and children is illegal, they were told, and so is chewing khat, the leafy amphetamine-like stimulant popular in Somalia. Performing genital excision on young girls is prohibited.
“If I can’t beat my wife, how will she know that I love her?” Abrone asked, seated next to his silent teenage bride.
Monogamy was equally unpopular with some men, who said their religion permitted four wives. But Kassim shut down the debate. “It doesn’t matter,” he told them. “In the U.S. you’ll barely be able to afford one wife, anyway.”
{snip}
The day ended with a tour of the mock kitchen and bathroom. Mohammed ran his fingers over the surface of the gas stove as if it were a shiny new Porsche. Kassim demonstrated how to use a variety of strange Western products, including toothpaste, shampoo and toilet paper.
“Why must I hide behind the curtain in the shower?” one student asked.
“It’s to prevent the water from splashing,” Kassim explained.
Some refugee experts worry that the classes focus too heavily on such basic household lessons.
“They can learn about flushing toilets and riding buses once they get there,” said Hussain Mahmood, head of the Kakuma branch of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which also works with Somali refugees. “Instead, I think they’d be better served by a frank discussion about the discrimination and hostilities they may face as Muslims or Africans in the U.S. What’s going to happen when a woman in a scarf meets some skinhead? I’d like to see more about dealing with those cultural challenges.”
By the end of the second day, however, the challenges of living in the U.S. were beginning to sink in for some.
“I’m starting to worry about where I will live and who will take care of my baby when I go to work,” said Fozia Ahmed Hussein Mohammed, 24 and eight months pregnant. Her boyfriend was not eligible to go with her.
“This is going to be more difficult than I thought,” she said.
By the third day, Kassim was scrambling to squeeze in the final lessons. He turned to finances and budgeting. Immigrants might hope to earn $1,000 a month, he told them, but rent for a two-bedroom apartment averages $800, depending upon the area. “One income will not be enough,” he said.
New arrivals get a 30-day assistance package, including help finding a house or apartment, but after that they are expected to find employment. U.S. government relief programs, such as food stamps and welfare, are also available to immigrants.
{snip}

Original article
(Posted on September 12, 2006)

[fjack]

This is one of the worst cases of 'officials' bending over backwards to reach racial parity.

Affirmative Action at Work
Paved With Good Intentions, New Century Books, 2nd Edition 2004


[Excerpt from Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure Of Race Relations In Contemporary America, by Jared Taylor]

Larry Gatt grew up in San Francisco and always wanted to be a fireman. The Fire Department had always hired firemen in what it thought to be the fairest possible way. Every four to six years, it gave a test, and hired the people with the best scores.

Firemen must have brains as well as brawn. They must understand chemical fires, gas fires, and toxic discharges, and use the best technique to stop the blaze. They must give first aid to people who are burned, electrocuted, drowned, shot, or mangled on the highway. They must also be strong enough to hack their way through doors, sprint up stairways, and carry unconscious people down ladders. San Francisco therefore had two tests, one written and the other physical, with a weighting of 60:40 in favor of brains over brawn. The department gave the written test first.

Mr. Gatt was eligible to take the test in 1982, a year when the department was under court order to hire minorities. No discrimination had been proven, but the department did not have enough minorities. Seven thousand people signed up for the written test, and thirty-five hundred actually took it. The department had made a strong effort to advertise the test to minorities. It managed to sign up a good number of blacks, but only a reported 20 percent of them showed up for the test. The department knew it had a problem as soon as the tests were graded: Not enough blacks had passed. The department dropped the passing score from 70 to 60, crossed its fingers, and gave the physical test. Theoretically, if most of the whites who had passed the written test failed the physical test, while most of the blacks passed, the department might have had enough minorities to satisfy the court.

It did not work out that way. Once the scores were combined, if the department had worked its way down the list to get the two hundred people it needed, it would have ended up with far too many whites. Of the fifteen hundred people who passed both tests, Mr. Gatt was number forty-three. He would have gotten a job. The department showed the results to the court. It pointed out that it was not the department’s fault if blacks did not show up for the test, or failed it if they took it. The court did not care. It wanted more blacks on the force.

The department swallowed hard and threw out the results of the written test. It ended the practice of hiring firemen for both brains and brawn, and decided to hire on brawn alone. It made a ranking of 190 men based only on the physical test. Mr. Gatt was still on that list, but he had dropped from forty-third to ninety-fifth. He still had a chance.

The department finally hired only thirty-nine men, and two thirds of these were minorities. Even on the list of brawn alone, it was only the whites who were hired strictly according to rank order. The department picked blacks who ranked lower than whites in order to get enough minorities. The department stopped far short of hiring the number of men it needed because the process had become so politicized and unsuitable.

Mr. Gatt did not get a job. He has since taken the test again. He has continued to be passed over so the department could hire minorities. He has never achieved his childhood ambition, to work for the San Francisco Fire Department. Mr. Gatt, like many whites who have been pushed aside in the name of affirmative action, is bitter. “I don’t care who gets the job,” he says, “so long as he’s chosen fairly. They made a mockery of the test—they just hired the people they wanted.”

Mr. Gatt points out that this is not the only time that white firemen face discrimination. “It doesn’t end at the front door,” he says. “It follows you for your whole career, with promotions and everything.” In fact, the fire department found that once they were hired, minorities did not do as well as whites on the examinations for promotion to lieutenant. Once again, under court order, it devised a special grading system so that minorities could pass, and promoted them over the heads of whites who had scored higher. The department went even farther. It decided that the original test, which white firemen passed in greater number than blacks, must have been discriminatory. Blacks who had taken the old test therefore got promotions and tens of thousands of dollars in back pay.

It is not hard to imagine what this does to the morale of a fire department. Can veterans be happy with new recruits who are hired, not because they are qualified, but because they are black? Can whites help feeling cheated when they see less-qualified blacks promoted over them? Whites who might make excellent fire fighters will think twice about a job with a biased employer. San Francisco’s fire department will not be as good as it could be. And finally, biased hiring patterns devalue the accomplishments of blacks who could have made it on ability alone.

What goes on in San Francisco is typical of fire and police departments across the country. Freddie Hernandez, a Hispanic lieutenant in the Miami fire department, explains how things work: “We hire 60 percent Hispanics here, regardless of qualifications. . . . They just have people take a test, and they pick minorities [even] from the bottom of the list.”

In Detroit, a federal court upheld a promotion scheme that established two lists for police officers, one black and one white. Half of all promotions must be black, with the best candidates chosen in equal numbers from the two lists. Blacks compete for promotions only against other blacks.

Detroit made no pretense of making blacks compete against whites for promotions. Other fire and police departments have tried to stick to the old way of promoting officers strictly according to test results, but are under court order to promote a certain number of blacks. Usually it is impossible to do both. When promotion examinations are used, blacks do not pass in sufficient numbers to satisfy affirmative action requirements.

The universal explanation for this is that the promotion tests are racially or culturally biased. Presumably, if a test suffers from cultural bias, someone familiar with the cultures involved could go through it in advance and eliminate bias. This has been attempted many times, but blacks still do not pass these tests at anything like the same rate as whites. Perhaps people are trying to remove something that is not there. In 1982, the National Academy of Sciences did a thorough investigation of cultural bias on standardized tests and strongly discounted the notion that there even is such a thing. Nevertheless, this study has been widely ignored, and cultural bias stands alone as the explanation for why blacks and Hispanics do less well on tests than whites and Asians.

When it comes to a policing exam given to professional policemen, it is difficult to imagine what form cultural bias could take. This has not stopped cities from taking great pains to correct it. San Francisco spent nearly $1 million over a period of nearly five years trying to devise a test that minorities could pass in equal numbers to whites. The city never got one. In 1991 a judge ordered that twenty-two nonwhites be promoted over the heads of whites who had gotten better scores on the new, presumably biasfree test.

For ten years, New York City police battled lawsuits claiming that biased tests prevented minorities from getting deserved promotions to sergeant. Finally, in 1989, the department hit upon the idea of inviting black and Hispanic officers to help design the test, thus eliminating bias. Even so, less than 2 percent of the blacks who took it passed; 95 percent of all promotions to sergeant were non-Hispanic whites. The department braced itself for another round of lawsuits.

Something else the New York City police have tried is to replace the pencil-and-paper test for sergeant with a video-based test. The theory was that any written exam was biased against blacks. This proved no better than the traditional exam at giving equal pass rates. When the results were announced, both black and Puerto Rican spokesmen denounced the test as biased.

In 1992, the city’s fire department took a different approach. It decided that minorities do less well than whites on multiple-choice tests because of “test anxiety.” The city paid a consultant to devise a test in which candidates got three choices rather than just one to pick the right answer. Getting the right answer as the first choice was to be worth a full point, with a half point and a quarter point awarded to anyone who got the right answer as second or third choice, respectively. Besides reducing “test anxiety,” another effect of this would be to narrow the gap in test scores between people who know the right answer and people who do not. More minorities might thereby get a passing grade.

One way to squeeze bias out of a test is to make it so easy that anyone can pass it. New York’s Sanitation Department indulged in an enormous waste of time when it gave a test on which 23,078 applicants out of 24,000 got perfect scores. Presumably, the department could then claim to have hired only those minorities who got the highest possible score.

Since it has proven impossible to design meaningful tests that do not give “biased” results, the Houston Fire Department worked out a court-approved method to eliminate bias after a test was taken. In 1991 it gave a one-hundred-question test for promotions, with a passing grade of 70. Whites got better scores than blacks. The court agreed that the department could then study the results and throw out questions that minorities were more likely than whites to get wrong. The reasoning was that if they got them wrong, they must have been biased, even if no one could have known that in advance.

The department farmed the test scores out to a private consulting firm, which duly eliminated twenty-eight questions. This meant that thirty-two people who had originally passed now had failing grades. They were twenty-four whites, four blacks, three Hispanics, and one Asian. After the test was rescored, thirteen people who had originally failed were found to have passed: five blacks, four Hispanics, and four whites. Since eight minorities had been knocked off the pass list but nine had been added to it, the exercise resulted in a net gain of one. Naturally, the people who had been knocked off the pass list, including the minorities, were hopping mad, but the Houston fire chief got one more minority promotion out of the exercise.

This was plain hard luck for the blacks who got the right answers on questions that were supposed to be “biased” against them, and it was a piece of good luck for the whites who got the wrong answers on questions that were supposed to be “biased” in their favor. This sort of foolishness makes a joke out of what is supposed to be an objective procedure, but some people would do double backflips if that were what it took to get the right number of black promotions.

The entire debate about cultural bias must seem faintly surreal to Darryl Hayden of Indianapolis. In 1985, out of 1,250 applicants for jobs as fire fighters, he got the highest test score. Cultural bias appears to have been no obstacle to him, despite the fact that he is black.

Original article

(Posted on September 14, 2006)

[MasterWolf1]

Would you feel secured if you are in a hospital and need surgery and your doctor happens to of studied voodoo medicine in Haiti???