The Biden-Harris Department of Justice has taken a curious approach to hiring practices in police and fire departments, targeting them with lawsuits for supposedly “racist” requirements like basic math skills. Yep, the DOJ is calling it discriminatory to expect public safety workers to meet elementary math standards. The latest in this string of cases is against South Bend, Indiana, where the DOJ claims that a math and physical fitness test discriminates against Black and female applicants. Apparently, requiring firefighters to know how to calculate the number of hoses needed or to run quickly is too much to ask.
This crackdown comes at an awkward time for Kamala Harris, who’s been trying to rebrand as a moderate in the final stretch of the presidential race. Her administration’s insistence that these job tests are racist seems to reinforce a perception that they view certain communities as inherently incapable of passing basic exams. And to justify it all, they’re relying on the theory of “disparate impact.” This theory suggests that if racial disparities exist, racism must be the root cause—never mind any actual evidence of discrimination.
The lawsuits don’t stop at South Bend. Last week, Durham, North Carolina, settled with the DOJ, agreeing to pay nearly a million dollars to Black applicants who failed the firefighter exam. Apparently, they’re even required to hire up to 16 people who flunked. Meanwhile, those Black applicants who passed get nothing. If the test itself is supposedly racist, why wouldn’t all Black applicants deserve compensation? The logic is, well, a bit lacking.
In another settlement, the DOJ accused Cobb County, Georgia, of unfairly eliminating Black candidates from consideration for firefighter roles, arguing that written exams and credit checks disproportionately impacted Black applicants. The DOJ, however, doesn’t explain why the majority of applicants can pass these tests or how a standard written test could be racist only to some.
And in Maryland, the DOJ required state police to fork over $2.75 million to women and Black applicants who failed basic fitness and written exams. The goal here, according to the DOJ, is to ensure that the police and firefighters are more diverse, but at what cost? Lowering standards for public safety roles has real consequences. Memphis’s police force, for example, faced public outrage when poorly vetted hires were involved in incidents of police brutality, despite the fact that all the involved officers were Black.
If this trend continues, we’re in for an era where qualifications matter less than hitting diversity quotas. And while diversity is worth pursuing, public safety should never be put on the back burner.
If forced to hire less qualified personnel they should assign them to their own ethnic neighborhoods. Maybe then they will learn that hiring unqualified personnel has very bad results! But probably not.