The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled today that the Chicago Fire Department illegally discriminated against hundreds of black job applicants.
The fire department's reliance on results from a 1995 civil service exam had a negative “disparate impact” on black applicants.
The decision could mean the city will have to pay up to $100 million in damages to applicants who were party to the lawsuit.
Mayor Daley acknowledged today that fire department hiring has long been a sensitive issue. “For decades we have tried to diversify the Chicago Fire Department,” the Mayor said in a statement. “But at every turn, like most cities, we have been met with legal challenges from both sides.”
Daley also noted that the fire department has since changed its hiring practices, making the entrance exam pass/fail and recruiting job candidates from black neighborhoods.
The case stems from the 1995 written exam the department administered to 26,000 applicants for just a few hundred positions. The department decided that it would only hire applicants who scored above 89 – even though it determined that applicants who scored between 65 and 88 were also qualified to be firefighters.
So in 1998 six black applicants who scored between 65 and 88 filed a civil action. The plaintiffs claimed that the city lacked justification in denying them a shot at employment since they were deemed qualified.
The city conceded that it violated civil rights law. But it argued that the plaintiffs didn’t file their suit in time and also that not setting a cut-off score would have been impractical.
A U.S. Circuit of Appeals previously sided with City Hall.
The high court, though, said the city must be held responsible for violating the law even if it will further muddy an already contentious hiring process.
“It is not our task to assess the consequences of each approach and adopt the one that produces the least mischief,” wrote Justice Antonin Scalia. “Our charge is to give effect to the law Congress enacted.”