Strange Logic: Massachusetts Minority Cops Get $40 Million
Taxpayers in Massachusetts will pay $40 million to settle with hundreds of minority police officers in the state who said a civil service promotional exam discriminated against them.
A judge agreed with those officers and ruled that the test purposefully generated lower scores for blacks and Hispanics, according to an article this week in The Boston Herald.
What, specifically, was discriminatory about the test? The reasons, as explained by the newspaper and an online summary of the lawsuit: the test required too much rote-memorization and tested too little on job-specific skills.
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That alone discriminates against minority officers?
That explanation is vague and begs two important questions:
• The courts assume that minorities are incapable of memorizing information for a test?
• Is this case another example of what former Republican President George W. Bush described as liberals having “the soft bigotry of low expectations” for minorities?
On Tuesday RVIVR.com contacted the Massachusetts Association of Minority Law Enforcement (MAMLEO), the organization that helped file the original complaint. In an email sent Tuesday at noon to MAMLEO President Jeffrey Lopes, RVIVR asked for more concrete information that corroborates that the civil service test does, in fact, discriminate against black and Hispanic officers. RVIVR also asked Lopes to provide any additional context he deemed necessary.
Lopes, however, did not return that request for comment before Wednesday morning.
As The Herald reported, the $40 million that the 600 officers will divide amongst themselves will end up at around $67,000 per officer, but they will not share it equally.
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“The two sides hammered out a formula that’s meant to divvy it up by missed pay and what the settlement characterizes as ‘alleged emotional distress,’” The Herald reported.
Leftists say Massachusetts bureaucrats have a history of shortchanging minorities as well as women.
As reported last November, Massachusetts State Auditor Suzanne Bump published a state audit that revealed the state’s Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) didn’t hire enough women and minorities for contract jobs.
Massachusetts law requires that state construction contracts have 15.3 percent participation goals for minorities and 6.9 percent for women. Auditors lectured the DCR to develop new policies and procedures to meet those thresholds.
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