Opinion ID: 371157
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Prior Discrimination Against Black Officers

Text: 22 The district court also made findings which were the basis of its rejection of defendants' claim that affirmative action was justified. The first rejected defense was the contention that prior racial discrimination by the Department warranted remedial affirmative action. 23 With respect to recent hiring, the district court found that use of the entry level exam beginning in 1973 resulted in random hiring rather than hiring the most qualified applicants. The court found that although the test was not job related, scoring it by use of differential regression equations resulted in hiring black and white applicants in approximately equal numbers. Use of this exam, scored in this way, was found to reflect the racial composition of the city rather than a concern with hiring those best suited to be patrolmen. 24 Considering the other elements of the promotional model, the district court found that none was shown to have any disparate impact or to discriminate against black candidates in any way. He specifically found that there was no evidence which showed an intentional discrimination in use of the seniority factor; rather he found that seniority equally affected blacks as well as whites and that if this factor discriminated it did so against the younger, less senior officers without regard to their race. 446 F.Supp. at 993. 25 However, the district court also found that, until 1973, the Department's entrance examinations failed a disproportionate number of black applicants. Even after the examination was changed in 1968 and again in 1971 to cure its exclusionary effects, the tests continued to screen out greater numbers of blacks than whites. 446 F.Supp. at 999. The District Judge stated his conclusion in the following summary: 26 . . . until 1973 entry level (hiring) written examinations of the Detroit Police Department may have constituted a source of discrimination against blacks seeking entry into the department because these examinations were heavily weighted on I.Q. type questions, were not job related and tended to fail large numbers of blacks vis a vis whites. However, the evidence also shows that after installation of the Detroit Furcon exams in 1973, no discrimination of any form existed in regard to black applicants for positions as police officers. 60 27 60. At this point in time blacks and whites were passing the entry examinations at approximately the same rate. 28 446 F.Supp. at 1000. 29 The court made no findings regarding defendants' evidence of specific instances of discrimination in the conditions of employment, but concluded that no evidence of discriminatory failure to hire qualified applicants had been presented. 30 Defendants' statistical evidence of historical hiring discrimination was considered and rejected. The district court divided the data into two groups: the numbers of black and white persons hired from 1944 to 1968, and the numbers of black and white appointees and applicants from 1968 to 1975. It was found that the statistics presented by the defendants failed to show discrimination against black applicants for employment in either the distant or recent past. While noting that the Department had hired relatively small numbers of black officers between 1944 and 1968, the court found the data incomplete. No comparative census data or numbers of applications by race during these years were presented, and the court therefore concluded that these naked numbers of black and white hired is (sic) susceptible to a multitude of conclusions. Id. at 998. 31 With respect to the years 1968-1975, when census data and the numbers of applications by race were available, the district court found other deficiencies which created a lack of statistical verity. Therefore the court decided to accord no weight to statistical evidence which indicates on its face a significant difference in the success rate of black and white applicants. Id. 32 Past promotional practices were also found not to be discriminatory either in the composition of the promotional models or their application. 33 The district court made a statistical analysis which showed to its satisfaction that there was no underutilization of blacks by the Department. This analysis consisted of a comparison of the black proportion of the police force with the black proportion of the entire local labor market. The district court found that the bulk of all applicants for police positions came from a tri-county area (Wayne, Oakland and Macomb) in which the combined 1970 population possessing the minimum requirements for police employment was 18.6% Black. Treating this as the relevant labor market, the district court found that a black component of 17.23% In the police department in 1974 did not represent a significant underutilization. The court flatly rejected use of the general population of the City of Detroit, which was about 44 percent black in 1970, as the relevant labor market. The district court neither explicitly rejected nor applied the labor market of the City of Detroit, which in 1970 was about 46 percent black. 4