Fire Department’s Shining Image Clouded by Audit : Bias: Previously, the agency handled problems behind the scenes. Now, critics exert more vocal pressure.

The Los Angeles City Fire Department has long liked to describe itself as one of the best in the business. And it hasn’t heard many naysayers.

In the firefighting world, the department was admired as a model of innovation and superior training. In the community, city firefighters earned reputations for heroism, from battling deadly brush fires to braving gunfire in the riots.

That mantle of excellence helped make the Fire Department a virtually unassailable star in the city’s political firmament. Elected officials heaped praise on the department and often waived the hiring and budgetary freezes that dogged other city agencies. They put firefighters near the front of the line when it came time to hand out pay raises.

But that acclaim has been clouded in recent weeks by the release of a city audit that has suddenly made the Fire Department the object of intense criticism by its own employees, fire commissioners and members of the City Council. The audit and subsequent public hearings have revealed a department torn by racial and gender divisions--where women and minorities are drummed out at high rates and the top brass is composed almost entirely of white men.

The complaints have been a startling aberration for a department that for 20 years has quietly proceeded with a court-ordered affirmative action program, avoiding a public bloodletting on the emotional issue. The department’s heroic standing and its insular, close-knit organization were not the least among the factors that muted complaints, according to former firefighters, fire commissioners, council members and others.

Inside the department, many firefighters said a quasi-military culture and fear of retaliation prevented dissenters from widely airing their views. In the courts, the department’s entry-level hiring satisfied affirmative action goals. In the city’s political leadership, those who pushed hardest for affirmative action preferred a policy of quiet negotiation rather than confrontation. And in the public’s eye, there was no evidence of diminished service or the kind of watershed controversy--like the Police Department’s fatal shooting of Eula Love or the beating of Rodney G. King--that might drive demands for more progress.

“The Fire Department has always been kind of the pride and joy of the city,” said Rick Taylor, a political consultant who has worked with many of the city’s elected leaders. “I think they have been able to escape political scrutiny because of their strong public perception.”

One black former elected official, who asked not to be named, suggested that the atmosphere of confrontation might do more harm than good. “One of the differences between us and the generation (of officials) now is that we realized that if you bang on the table you might win a battle but not the war,” the official said. “The war has to be won within the department and when a group feels that it is being forced into something there tend to be high levels of . . . antagonism to change.”

David Cunningham, an African American who served on the council during the first 12 years of court-ordered affirmative action, said there simply weren’t the votes to press for more minority promotions. “There were probably 1,001 things we could have done at that time,” said Cunningham, who left the council in 1986. “But there was very little interest in a couple of black councilmen complaining about the ability of blacks to move forward in the Fire Department.”

Former Councilman Robert Farrell, an African American who left the council in 1991, said the progress of integration has been reasonable in view of the fact that the Fire Department is “the most conservative work force in the city . . . (and) it takes time for the culture of an organization to shift significantly.”

Mayor Tom Bradley’s Fire Commission took Bradley’s quiet, conciliatory approach to the affirmative action issue--avoiding the kind of public showdown that occurred in December, in hearings before the City Council’s Personnel Committee and the Fire Commission.

Former Fire Commissioner Kenneth S. Washington, who is also black, said much of his work for affirmative action occurred behind the scenes. He recalled that on a few occasions he personally intervened on behalf of black firefighters, once visiting two firefighters on probation at their San Pedro station to suggest that they needed to be less rebellious toward their supervisors.

The two were impressed enough by the visit from a top official that they shaped up, survived their probations and remain on the force to this day, Washington said.

For the most part, disputes never reached a public stage.

“I was hoping change would come without making a lot of noise,” Washington said. “There were some changes and we managed to keep ourselves out of the newspaper. I was hoping they (department officials) would find religion and begin to do the right thing without a crisis.”

Many minority firefighters, particularly Latinos, have supported the notion that the department has been making progress and that they were not thwarted because of their ethnicity.

Even among African American firefighters--who since 1980 have had their own organization, the Stentorians--complaints have mostly been made within the chain of command. But when the audit was released and department management derided it as the isolated complaints of a few disgruntled employees, the Stentorians decided to hold a news conference to declare that racism remained widespread.

“(The audit) validated things that had been stuffed down inside,” said Kwame Cooper, president of the Stentorians. “And you have political figures asking the tough questions. That builds up more faith that something will happen, so you are willing to get a load off your chest.”

Fire departments around the country have been among the institutions most impervious to racial integration and the hiring and promotion of women. It took the landmark 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision, outlawing government-imposed racial segregation, for the Los Angeles Fire Department to move black firefighters out of the handful of stations where they had been assigned.

Twenty years later, black and white firefighters were living and working together, but the department remained 94% white. A lawsuit by the federal government forced the city in 1974 to agree that 50% of each incoming class of firefighter recruits would be nonwhite.

Today, according to the audit, the Fire Department has made progress in hiring a force, at least at the entry level, that more closely mirrors the city it serves. The department is 11% black (compared to the city’s 13% black population), 23% Latino (40% in the city), and 3.5% Asian (6.7% in the city). Women make up 3% of the 3,100-member department.

Chief Donald O. Manning has also touted his personal commitment to affirmative action; he notes that he doubled the number of black fire captains--from six to 12--on a single day in the mid-1980s.

The Personnel Department audit acknowledged improvements in the hiring of minorities, but focused on complaints by minorities and women that they were subjected to harsher treatment and tougher evaluations and left by the wayside in a promotional system rife with cronyism. The audit and records show that minority and female firefighters have about twice the attrition rate of white men.

The audit also concluded that the lack of minorities in the department’s top ranks, where 19 of 20 officials are white men, reflected the continuing problems.

Some critics say the high attrition and lack of promotions for blacks can be blamed at least partly on an unwritten policy that prohibited more than one black firefighter per four-person engine company.

Bradley’s advisers were divided about the value of the policy, which had been instituted to prevent a return to the days when all the department’s blacks were forced to work in a handful of stations. The advisers theorized that if blacks were allowed to transfer at will, they would seek camaraderie by voluntarily segregating themselves into a few firehouses.

Arnett L. Hartsfield Jr., an African American who served in both the segregated and desegregated Los Angeles Fire Department, had argued strongly in 1990 that the transfer restrictions should remain in place. “I felt the rule was better than allowing our men to resegregate themselves,” said Hartsfield, a civil service commissioner under Bradley.

Fire Commissioner Washington argued privately with Hartsfield that the policy had become outdated and kept black firefighters from building the kind of emotional support that might have prolonged their careers. But Washington lost the internal squabble and never pressed publicly for an end to the one-black-per-company rule.

Manning said in an interview that he had merely enforced the policy, which he called a brainchild of the Bradley Administration. Washington said that, regardless of who started it, Manning argued that the policy should stay in place to prevent white flight from fire companies with more than one black.

During most of the last decade, up to 10 black firefighters a year were denied transfers because of the rule, a number that may have jumped to as many as 20 blocked transfers a year more recently, said Deputy Chief Donald Anthony, who has overseen department promotions for the last 12 years. Anthony said firefighters seldom ask why they do not receive transfers and none were ever told that race was the reason.

“I think that just would have created additional issues,” Anthony said. “I did not feel anyone was hurt or harmed because they didn’t get a specific position.”

But Cooper, president of the Stentorians, said the policy “had a really negative impact on us.” Without the limit on transfers, black firefighters could have supported each other emotionally by working together and better positioning themselves for promotions, Cooper said.

It was not until the arrival in 1993 of Mayor Richard Riordan and the appointment of a new Fire Commission that Manning quietly ended the rule.

All those actions took place behind closed doors, with no public acknowledgment that such a policy existed.

In contrast, it is a much more vocal group of political leaders that has pushed the affirmative action debate in the last several weeks.

City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, who replaced Farrell, got the ball rolling nearly a year ago by pushing for an audit of hiring and promotion practices. Fire Commissioner Song Winner has pressed Manning and his staff to explain their policies. And Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg has scheduled the hearings that have given the issue an exhaustive public airing.

“A fortuitous grouping of people makes a change more possible now,” Washington said.

Manning, the man in the middle of the controversy, said in a recent interview that he never saw the storm coming. “With the effort I put into affirmative action, up until the time this hit, this was an area I never dreamed I would have run into difficulty,” he said.

Indeed, for most of his 12-year tenure, Manning has won nearly universal praise for his efforts in hiring women and minorities.

He joined the department in the first year of desegregation, 1955, and vaulted to the chief’s office in 1983. He was elevated over two higher-scoring competitors, in large part because the Fire Commission believed he had a better plan for hiring minorities and women.

It was shortly after his hiring that the first woman firefighter was hired.

Manning’s performance reviews are not part of the public record, but he regularly received raises at or near the top of the range. Today he is the highest paid official in the city, making $171,153 a year.

Privately, some observers wonder whether the 62-year-old Manning will endure the heat of the current controversy or retire with his $119,808-a-year pension.

But Manning said he has no intention of departing under a cloud.

“I want to get all this in the proper perspective and dealt with,” Manning said. “I don’t want to leave . . . with my work uncompleted.”

Fire Dept. Under Fire

* The report of the audit of the Los Angeles City Fire Department, is available on TimesLink. Also available are details of the Fire Commission’s reactions. Look in the State & Local section. To order a package of stories on the controversy, call the Times on Demand order line. Press *8630. Select option 1. Order No. 5512. $4.

Details on Times electronic services, A6