City Councilor Andrea Campbell is calling on Mayor Martin Walsh’s administration to make Boston’s emergency management systems more diverse — though the city’s top diversity officer says Boston is actually on the right track.
“Our public-safety departments are overwhelmingly white, male and English-speaking,” Campbell said during Wednesday’s city council meeting, when she introduced a hearing order on diversity in the city’s emergency services. “All of these departments are obviously drastically different than the city of Boston.”
Campbell called for more transparency about the numbers and also for a study into whether to continue using the civil service process, a standardized test, for the fire department’s hiring.
“These numbers haven’t changed,” Campbell said, noting that her order uses the 2018 numbers, though she said she’s received more recent ones. “An initial review of the figures I received left me concerned.”
Boston, according to Campbell’s hearing order, is 44.9% white, 22.7% black, 19.4% Hispanic and 9.4% Asian, and just over half are women. She said that in 2018, of 2,073 Boston police officers, 67% were white, 22% were black, 9% were Hispanic, and 2% were Asian — and 13% were female. Of 1,511 Boston firefighters, 72% were white, 19% black, 8% Hispanic, and 0.4% Asian, with just 1% being women.
Both the fire and police departments have taken flak for this in recent years — especially the fire department, which has faced allegations of sexism, as outlined in a city-commissioned report last year.
But Danielson Tavares, the city’s chief diversity officer, told the Herald that the departments’ recruitment and cadet efforts have actually led to recent improvements, including the latest BPD recruitment class of 126 being 46% people of color and 30% female.
“That’s one of our most diverse classes in the history of the department,” Tavares said. “The numbers have gone up — there’s no question.”
Tavares added that there remains “work to do,” particularly on diversifying the middle- and upper-management of these departments, something that Campbell focused on, too.
“We certainly need to do more — but it’s not a matter of lack of effort,” Tavares said.
Tavares noted a focus on hiring locals, and said the city increasingly has received waivers from the normal civil-service process to hire candidates who speak other languages.
“It’s good to have young kids who grew up in these neighborhoods to be the ones patrolling these neighborhoods,” Tavares said.
Campbell’s order for a hearing, which hasn’t been scheduled yet, was assigned to the council’s Committee on Public Safety & Criminal Justice, which Campbell chairs.
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