Sept. 07--A black San Francisco firefighter who accused the fire department of making him endure months of racially motivated abuse during his training -being referred to as a "house boy," and made to scrub toilets and floors with a toothbrush -- will be paid $175,000 in a tentative legal settlement.
In his suit, Larry Jacobs, now 48, accused top fire officials of a racially motivated humiliation campaign starting in 2005, in which he was kept apart and told not to eat with or speak to firefighters. He also said he was relegated to hard labor in lieu of training for nearly a year.
The goal, his suit said, was to humiliate him into dropping out of the department.
The city and department officials defended the menial labor as being not unusual for injured rookies. They denied race had anything to do with it.
According the city attorney's motion to dismiss the case, Jacobs was known as "Conspiracy Theory" by his fellow rookies and never suffered financially from his supposed mistreatment.
Jacobs' account of abuse got an unlikely boost from veteran firefighters who witnessed what one of them called a deliberate effort to get Jacobs and two other African American rookie firefighters to drop out of the 29-member rookie class in 2005.
While Jacobs persevered and is still in the department, the two others in the class gave up.
Years of abuse alleged
According to the legal filings, Tom Siragusa -- head of training at the time and currently an assistant chief -- declared to his staff at a meeting that the training program had gone soft and that more recruits needed to flunk to restore the program's reputation among other fire departments.
Jacobs -- who was in the first class Siragusa commanded in May 2005 -- alleged that he was subjected to three years of abuse to get him to flunk. He said the campaign began when he questioned why a training official had failed him on a knot-tying test -- a test he ultimately passed by tying the exact same knot.
By that time, he had passed 67 out of 75 tests -- scoring 100 percent on many of them -- but had logged so many deficiencies in the knot-tying category that he was on the verge of flunking out.
After belatedly telling officials about having injured his shoulder while hoisting a ladder, Jacobs was taken out of training and put on light duty. The city attorney's office said Jacobs was being investigated for reporting his injury too late under department regulations and could have been dismissed, but he stayed on.
Instead, Jacobs was put to work, first painting outside in near-100-degree heat and becoming what one fire official declared was "probably the highest-paid janitor in the city," Jacobs' suit said.
He was posted at the department's Treasure Island training academy -- but not to be trained. Here, Jacobs said, he was segregated -- ordered not to speak to his fellow rookies or dine with them or other fire officials. He ate in his car.
Manual labor
Over 10 months, Jacobs said, he was provided only a toothbrush to do cleaning. His first assignment was the 7-by-6-foot kitchen floor -- a job that took eight hours. He then used the brush to scrub clean the bathroom toilets and lockers.
Fire officials, according to the suit, took to calling him "house boy." When he was not scrubbing, Jacobs said, he was told to weed and clean the academy's 8-acre grounds -- a job for which a private crew had been paid $200,000 before budget cuts. Despite his shoulder injury, Jacobs said, he was made to singlehandedly shovel up loose gravel and debris. He tended to the staff's barbecue, groomed the baseball diamond and organized the clothing depot.
Even after he was judged fit by doctors, he was told there was no spot for him to be trained and he continued manual labor. Even after he completed his academy training, the abuse continued, according to his suit.
For instance, fire officials ordered that he submit to back-to-back drug tests. And when he passed those, the suit said, they made him repeatedly take a test to prove his ability to prepare a fire hose for use.
The trouble was, according to the suit, they would tie the hose in knots and take apart critical pieces before giving Jacobs 10 minutes to prepare the hose.
Other firefighters did not have to untangle or reassemble the hose in similar tests, the suit said. He failed the 10-minute test four times. Only on the fifth time -- during a test that was witnessed by an observer from the Black Firefighters Association group armed with a video camera -- did Jacobs pass the test.
Supervisors to decide
Jacobs blamed Chief Joanne Hayes-White for failing to stop the harassment campaign. While the chief did intervene, the improvements in his treatment were only temporary and the abuse soon resumed, according to the suit.
The settlement has been approved by the fire commission and awaits final action by the Board of Supervisors.
Jaxon Van Derbeken is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: [email protected]
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