Being a Chicagoan whose ethnicity has been slurred repeatedly over Chicago Fire Department radio frequencies is bad enough. Being a Chicagoan whose tax dollars helped purchase the microphones, transmitters and speakers via which these hateful, hurtful words have been broadcast, being a Chicagoan whose taxes evidently pay the wages of bigots, that’s injury added to the insult.
Once again, Chicago has been rocked by charges that some of its firefighters aren’t comfortable serving many of the people who live here.
The five racist radio transmissions of recent weeks have generated more shock than surprise. The transmissions didn’t occur in a void. They follow more than three decades of tension within the department since its ranks were belatedly integrated in 1968.
Most of that tension over the years has stayed within the city’s firehouses. On rare occasion, citizens have been able to peer inside, or to listen from afar. What they’ve seen and heard isn’t always ennobling.
In 1997, a videotape surfaced depicting a 1990 firehouse retirement party at which firefighters were drinking, exposing themselves and uttering racial slurs.
One of the firefighters who attended the party, James McNally, now is president of Chicago Fire Fighters Union Local 2. On another occasion, he appeared in black face to protest promotions motivated by affirmative action.
This is not to say most Chicago firefighters condone racism. But firefighters–provocateurs and innocents alike–do need to appreciate how grave these five radio incidents are, as is the delivery of a death threat to a battalion chief who heads the African American Fire Fighters League of Chicago.
There are times, particularly when the offenders are young or ignorant, when ugly behavior can be forgiven if not forgotten, when its perpetrators can be redeemed if not encouraged.
This is not one of those times. This behavior, in this department, in this city, is intolerable. There is no wellspring of goodwill upon which an offending firefighter can call, no margin for middling penance.
Simply put, these disgusting, dehumanizing incidents follow too much history. Fire Commissioner James Joyce declared last week that “offenses like these will be fireable offenses.” Translation: Joyce has committed himself to judging each case individually, but he has put every one of his employees on notice that the range of penalties unquestionably includes dismissal. Mayor Richard Daley concurred, stating that a still unidentified person–thought to be a firefighter–who voiced racial slurs broadcast March 1 should admit his action and face the “ultimate consequences.”
That is the correct response. When these kinds of calculated affronts to city and department policy occur, when reasonable citizens are left to wonder about the integrity of the firefighters they employ, jobs should–must–be on the line.
But whether Joyce can fulfill his own prophecy is another matter. The department terminated seven firefighters who appeared in the 1990 videotape. They challenged the dismissals before an arbitrator and eventually won back their jobs–with pension and seniority rights, the department says, although without four years of back pay.
Merely identifying whoever has been spewing filth on fire department frequencies isn’t easy. One veteran firefighter who voiced racist slander, and a supervisor who didn’t react properly, have been suspended over the first of the five incidents. It’s likely the subsequent transmissions originated on fire department radios, but in this era of clever hackers and electronic gadgetry, the department isn’t yet certain that no outsider is involved. Joyce, though, hasn’t sounded like a boss who expects to learn that his own employees are innocent. Last week he denounced an “underground Web site” that offered firefighters tips on how to obscure their identities when transmitting over department frequencies. “That’s what we’re up against,” he said.
He’s also up against an unmeasured amount of denial over society’s gradual progress on race. Many of today’s Chicago firefighters did come of age in a department culture that to varying degrees rewarded three attributes: skill, courage and clout. Affirmative action, though, is about a fourth, and to some foreign, attribute: fairness. It’s understandable, if not admirable, that adding fairness to the mix caused resentment among those who feel that the long-overdue accelerated promotion of minorities–a cause Joyce has advanced–is unfair to some whites who don’t get those promotions. What’s not understandable is for any Chicago firefighter to permit that or any other frustration to be voiced in the most vicious bigotry imaginable.
Firefighters who don’t share that bigotry are now in the best position to lead the department out of its difficult past. One important step is to help nail the perpetrators of the radio incidents. Public racism tends to be a team sport. It’s likely someone inside or outside the department knows who originated these broadcasts. Stepping forward with that knowledge may require even more courage than racing into a burning house.
But restoring the department’s integrity, like rescuing fire victims, is a critical public service. And that cause, public service, should be key to how this sorry drama concludes. Any firefighter who merely wants to fight fire is free to resign and join the U.S. Forest Service. Any firefighter who wants to serve the public–in all its varied hues, in its wide range of good and bad behaviors, in its terrible moments when disaster strikes and panic ensues–is welcome to stay.
In short, if a firefighter finds himself risking his own life to save the lives of Chicagoans he finds unworthy of his respect, he should find another job. Fire Commissioner Joyce is right to pursue those few who’ve let that lack of respect get the best of them. The hope here is that he will root them out, adjudicate their cases under the due process to which they’re entitled–and subject them to the ultimate consequences Mayor Daley properly threatened last week.
