The Associated Press
BOSTON, Mass. (AP) - A federal judge has ordered the Boston Police Department to end its affirmative action hiring plan put in place 30 years ago in a consent decree over racial discrimination, ruling that the department has accomplished its minority hiring goals.
U.S. District Court Judge Patti B. Saris granted a request on Tuesday from eight white men denied jobs last year as police officers that she strike down the department’s policy of hiring one minority candidate for every white candidate hired.
The ruling ends three decades of affirmative action hiring at the police department, which had been following a 1974 consent decree requiring that the percentage of black and Hispanic officers reflect their percentage in the city’s population. The fire department had been under the same consent decree, but their policy was thrown out in March of last year.
In her ruling, Saris wrote that the police department met its goal of racial parity more than a year ago. To have used the racial hiring quota in October 2003, when plaintiff Paul DeLeo Jr. and seven other men were passed over, was unconstitutional.
Attorney Harold L. Lichten, who represented the eight men, said the ruling means that new officers will be hired on the basis of their scores, “not on whether they are black or white.”
Saris gave the two sides 15 days to decide how to provide relief to the eight men, all of whom still hope to be hired.
Nadine Cohen, an attorney with the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said the police department could revert back to the racial imbalance that the consent decree was supposed to remedy.
“We do not want to see a segregated police force,” she said. “That’s where we started out.”
The decree was the result of a 1970 lawsuit by black and Hispanic candidates denied positions as police officers.
Police Commissioner Kathleen O’Toole released a statement last night saying she wanted to reassure city residents that the ruling “does not mean that the department is abandoning its commitment to diversity,” but the decree “was not intended to last forever.”