Two more racist comments have been broadcast over the Chicago Fire Department’s radio frequencies, bringing the total number of such incidents to five in a little more than a month, Fire Commissioner James Joyce said Wednesday.
The origins of the latest remarks are under investigation, Joyce told the City Council’s Police and Fire Committee at a highly charged meeting during which minority aldermen repeatedly pointed to a long history of racial tension in the Fire Department.
Fire officials have linked only the first of the five offensive radio transmissions to a specific firefighter and handed him a 90-day suspension.
But on Wednesday, for the first time, Joyce said racist behavior by firefighters should be grounds for dismissal. The firefighters’ union contract currently does not lay out penalties for any misbehavior.
Joyce said racism by firefighters is “totally unacceptable and will not be tolerated.
“I consider this so serious I’m putting the department on notice that offenses like these will be fireable offenses,” he said.
The latest incident occurred at 5:59 a.m. Wednesday when someone broadcast a racial slur over the fire radio.
That incident followed one at 7:34 p.m. Tuesday when someone used a racial epithet in saying minority aldermen “on the City Council suck.” The statement was broadcast four consecutive times on three frequencies.
Joyce again suggested that the most recent incidents were a reaction to the punishment meted out last week against firefighter John Scheuneman, who was transferred from a firehouse in a largely black neighborhood after uttering racial put-downs Feb. 2 into an open microphone in a department vehicle.
The growing number of such incidents suggests that department officials could be facing a revolt in the ranks. In addition to the slurs that have been intercepted, Joyce told reporters after the committee session that firefighters are using an “underground Web site” to share tips on how to cover their tracks when transmitting on the fire radio.
“That’s what we’re up against,” he said.
Minority aldermen on Wednesday blasted the Fire Department and the union for their reaction to the spate of racist behavior, with some suggesting that firefighters do not put as much effort into serving minority neighborhoods.
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Ald. Ed Smith (28th) stressed that modern society finds racial epithets so repugnant that the media refrains from repeating them, and he found it impossible to portray the gravity of the situation without speaking frankly about the offensive terms.
“The Fire Department is the only department in town where they come out and call us niggers,” said Smith, who is black and represents a predominantly African-American section of the West Side.
Sensitivity training planned
The department plans to start new sensitivity-training programs for its personnel next week “to build trust in the community,” Joyce said.
Smith, however, said he doubted the effectiveness of such efforts. “How in the world can you sensitize anybody who is bent on” ridiculing blacks, Smith said.
Smith also predicted an “uprising” could break out over racism in the department.
“If one single alderman who is black in this council called some white people some names the way we’re getting called, this town would go up in smoke,” Smith said.
Some aldermen questioned how vigorously the department is tracking the perpetrators of the racist transmissions.
In one of the incidents, officials have said there is no way to find out who was responsible for the offensive comment.
During the hour in which Joyce fielded questions from aldermen, he was flanked by two black subordinates. That led Ald. Billy Ocasio (26th) to suggest that Joyce had used the African-American fire officials as props. “This really isn’t representative of your department,” Ocasio charged.
Ocasio said the overt put-downs of minorities by Fire Department personnel had led him to question whether white firefighters work as diligently to protect minorities as they do whites. “I went home [Tuesday night] and I made sure that I checked all the batteries in my smoke detectors,” said Ocasio, who is of Puerto Rican descent. “Just in case anything happens, I want to have enough time.”
Joyce said firefighters do not serve minority areas with less vigor. Later he told reporters that he was offended by Ocasio’s comment.
Hiring practices cited in past
Hiring practices in the department, which was integrated in 1968, have long been a primary source of conflict. In 1998 the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission charged that the city’s affirmative action efforts had “utterly failed” and that the city discriminated in the hiring and promotion of firefighters.
Though blacks make up the largest racial bloc in Chicago, the city’s force of 4,900 firefighters is about 70 percent white, 20 percent black and 10 percent Hispanic. That breakdown is virtually unchanged since a 1999 report found an “enormous” racial divide in the Fire Department.
The racist broadcasts also have resurrected the specter of another dark chapter in the department’s history, the 1997 release of a videotape made during a firehouse party. The tape, recorded in 1990 at a South Side fire station, featured firefighters making racist remarks and exposing themselves.
James McNally, now head of the firefighters’ union, appeared in that tape. He also once showed up at a firehouse in blackface to protest affirmative action policies.
Sitting in the audience in the council chambers, McNally said he would not comment “on the disciplinary levels that should be administered for any offense.”
The dismissal of Fire Department personnel accused of racism has proven difficult in the past. The department fired seven firefighters who appeared in the 1990 video only to see them win back their jobs in court.
Earlier Wednesday, before Joyce revealed the latest transmissions, Mayor Richard Daley said a still unidentified firefighter who uttered a string of slurs broadcast Monday should own up to it and suffer the “ultimate consequences.”
“If he doesn’t like people of different races or colors or religious or ethnic origin, he should quit,” Daley said. “But you don’t hear of too many firemen who want to quit. It’s one of the best jobs in America.”