A Charade Goes Up in Smoke : L.A. Fire Dept. admits its harassment inquiry failed

It didn’t sound right. It defied common sense. Yet Los Angeles Fire Department internal investigators concluded recently that the allegations of sexism against women and bias in the department had no merit. All of the charges, they maintained, were either based on misunderstandings or were just unsubstantiated--despite the fact that several men and women in the department all said they had heard department officials make anti-woman statements.

Now it turns out that there is no mass hypnosis in the L.A. Fire Department after all. The prejudicial statements that those firefighters thought they heard apparently really were said. And the investigation that suggested otherwise was flawed, Chief Donald O. Manning acknowledged Monday. Now Manning says he wants a special review board headed by two deputy chiefs to investigate the investigation.

What is going on here? It all started with complaints from minority firefighters to Los Angeles City Council members, who responded by commissioning an audit last year. That city audit, released in November, said that women and minorities have been locked out of top posts. Further, women and minority firefighters reported a significant amount of hostility at eight so-called “kill” stations where women and minority members were sent. Top fire officials initially dismissed the report, calling it a hatchet job.

But it didn’t end there. After the audit, a controversial videotape showing women struggling to perform basic training exercises came to light. That tape was played on television news nationwide and became a source of major embarrassment to a fire department long considered one of the nation’s finest. Indeed, the nation in recent years watched the Los Angeles Fire Department and other local departments skillfully battle devastating wildfires. Outside the department, nobody cared whether the firefighter under the uniform was male or female, white, black, Latino or Asian. Unfortunately, as the audit noted last fall, within the department minorities and women reported widespread harassment.

Those concerns were underscored by Capt. Bassanio Peters, who later told a council committee that in 1993 he overheard the chief in charge of the training division and the department’s female sexual harassment counselor remark that women are good only for “consoling (accident) victims” and that “females have no business being on the Fire Department.” Other firefighters also reported hearing the same or similar statements during the same conversations.

Yet before Manning did his latest about-face, the department denied all. Appropriately incredulous City Council members Jackie Goldberg and Mark Ridley-Thomas raised questions. They should keep raising them. Goldberg was prompted to ask whether the department administration is seeking to hide its problems or whether it is merely demonstrating its ineptitude. Not a happy choice.

The City Council’s personnel committee is now conducting closed-door hearings into this mess. The council should block Manning’s proposed review of the internal department investigation until its own hearings are concluded. Credibility is at stake here. Key questions about how the department conducted the now-discredited investigation must be answered. Until then, let’s have no more department investigations of the department. The fox guarding the henhouse comes to mind, but in this situation that expression is a little too ironic to be funny.