During his Nov. 17 meeting with East End residents at Pentecostal Temple Church, acting Pittsburgh police Chief Cameron McLay said with respect to hiring more African-American applicants said the only leverage he has is in recruiting.
“Before I arrived here the process was changed and is blind to race and gender,” he said.
What McLay was referring to was the elimination of part of the hiring process called the “rule of three,” which could be used to make sure favored recruit candidates made the cut—and others, possibly minorities or women—did not.
An active duty officer, who asked not to be identified, explained that the rule was applied when the committee comprised of police bureau command staff, Office of Municipal Investigations staff and Civil Service staff reviewed applicants’ files.
It is the last phase of the evaluation process prior to the psychiatric and physical stress testing required before being approved for the police academy.
“Okay, there’s your file, mine, a cop’s kid and, say, another cop’s niece,” the officer said. “First they pick the niece, then the cop’s kid, then they pick me. You’re out, because you’ve been passed up three times.
“So we’ve had a lot of qualified people who’ve been eliminated because they were up against people they know or people they owe,” the officer added. “That’s how you end up with whole families on the job.”
The new process, to be used for the next recruiting class is “blind” because it randomly couples an applicant’s test score and a sheet of background information—with any racial or gender identifiers removed—to a number. This is all the committee now sees.
While it would seem to be a positive step in the direction of eliminating nepotism and bias, it could still be compromised.
“If you know a commander’s nephew works as a part-time officer and had a traffic ticket, you can figure it out,” the officer said. “And while OMI generates the background, they use city detectives to do it—city detectives who could face retaliation from superiors if their reports said the wrong things.”
American Civil Liberties Union of Pittsburgh Legal Director Witold “Vic” Walczak confirmed the “rule of three” has been eliminated and the blind system put in place for the current recruiting class, but he could not go into any detail because it is an element of the negotiations related to the ACLU’s 2012 lawsuit against the city alleging that “every step in the police hiring process is discriminatory and rife with problems.”
“We’re in negotiations to reach a global settlement involving changes to hiring and redress for some people who may have been discriminated against,” he said.
On Oct. 28, city council passed a resolution authorizing Mayor Bill Peduto and the city solicitor to contract New Jersey firm E.B. Jacobs for up to $52,000 to “expert consulting services associated with revisions to the City’s methods used to hire police officers.” The council resolution specifically mentions reviewing “information identified in the background checks” of applicants.
Walczak did not comment on this contract, but the lawsuit against the city notes that E.B. Jacobs set up the “scenarios” and correct responses for candidates’ oral exams, as well as safeguards for eliminating bias. The suit notes these protocols were routinely ignored by the city’s representatives.
Some examples included:
•Panelists giving preferred candidates the scenarios and correct answers in advance;
•Supervisors obtaining candidate lists and pressuring panelist to approve relatives and friends; and
•Panelists giving African-Americans lower scores based on how they looked, spoke or dressed rather than on the E.B. Jacobs test criteria.
The lawsuit also alleges the background investigations and polygraph tests are used to weed out African-American candidates, noting that for the recruitment class of 2011, 55 percent of African-Americans were disqualified at that stage as opposed to 11 percent for Whites.
(Send comments to cmorrow@newpittsburghcourier.com.)
