August 2009 Issue Number 111

Is a monthly electronic newsletter which links current events and issues to the daily challenges faced by fire and emergency services managers. Current topics in the areas of leadership development, workplace diversity, change management, and conflict resolution will be discussed.

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Consider This...

Starting the Conversation

It is likely that no one will ever really know what happened inside the home of Professor Henry Louis Gates the day the Cambridge Police were called on suspicion of a burglary at that address. Even those who were present that day were probably so caught up in the heat of the moment that they are likely remembering the events in a somewhat revisionist way after the fact. And there is no question that it was bad judgment on President Obama’s part to comment on an incident that he was not a witness to, and for which he had incomplete information.

But maybe the president did us a favor as a nation that night, when he took one last question at his press conference. It was clear that the Gates incident affected him in a visceral way, and he responded as emotionally to it as the notoriously cerebral president is capable of. As a black man in America, there is no doubt that President Obama has personally experienced what every other black man I know has experienced: being suspected, followed, questioned, even arrested for no other reason than they are black in an area where blacks are not expected to be.

How can you measure the effect of that? I remember one morning at the fire station when my engineer came into work, noticeably subdued. He didn’t want to talk about it at first, but it finally came out that the previous morning, on his way home from the fire station, he was stopped and interrogated by the police, just a block away from his own home. There had been a crime committed in the predominantly white neighborhood overnight, and the suspect was only described as a “black man.” So this firefighter, just trying to get back to his home after a long shift at work, was detained for an hour, forced to answer questions, embarrassed in front of his family and neighbors.

But what about the other side of the equation? There is not a police officer in this country who has not been yelled at, called names, accused of wrongdoing, spit at, or worse, all in the course of just doing the necessary work of law enforcement. Yes, officers are trained to handle such treatment, but that doesn’t mean that it does not affect them. Police officers get paid, but the job often seems thankless, as can other forms of public safety, including firefighting. It is understandable if not professionally acceptable for police officers to react sometimes to such abuse.

There are at least two sides to every story, but usually those sides hunker down with their own allies and never engage the other in real dialogue. But now we’re all involved in this dispute, and as a nation, have the opportunity to create those conversations everywhere among us. How does it feel to be a black man in this country? What is a police officer’s life really like? A little understanding on both sides will go a long way to heal wounds in this country that go back many years.

A U.S. District Judge has ruled that the New York City Fire Department discriminated against minorities in its hiring of firefighters in 1999 and 2002. The judge agreed with the U.S. Department of Justice that the disparities among those taking firefighter entry exams were so wide as to constitute disparate impact, and that no trial was needed to rule against the city.

Source: Associated Press, July 22, 2009

Polarized Thinking and Problem Solving

A Kentucky fire captain was recently suspended from work after he showed up for his shift wearing Ku Klux Klan robes. A local police source said that the investigation was ongoing to determine whether the act was a practical joke gone wrong, or an actual hate crime.

A hate crime by definition is a “criminal offense committed against a person, property, or society that is motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity/national origin.” A practical joke is “a mischievous trick played on a person, especially one that causes the victim to experience embarrassment, indignity, or discomfort.”

There is a lot of space between these two possibilities

On the one hand, it seems unlikely that this incident on its face meets the standards of a true hate crime, which by definition is a criminal offense. On the other hand, it is a real stretch to say that wearing Klan robes to work is a “mischievous act.”

In fact, wearing Klan robes to work is at best incredibly stupid. It is certainly an offense demanding serious discipline. The fact that an officer committed this act is especially disturbing. An organization that had such an incident take place should take a hard look at its own culture to determine how someone might feel that this act could on any level be seen as acceptable.

There is a real problem here, but it doesn’t help in solving it to engage in polarized thinking– the logic of all-or-nothing. To say that this incident is either a hate crime or a practical joke misses the opportunity to find out what is really going on, and to do the difficult work of not only dealing with one bad act, but also looking deeper into what factors allowed that act to occur at all.

Source: WLKY, April 29, 2009

 

© Linda F. Willing, 2009