Villaraigosa and the City Council Pick Taxpayers Pockets With Fire Department Bias Suits
Earl Ofari Hutchinson
I posed this question to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, the Los Angeles City Council, and yes the taxpayers of Los Angeles in my Sunday Viewpoints column. Do you, no we, want to see our property taxes and user fees continue to soar to the sky? The resounding answer to that is no. But that grim prospect stares us in the face for one simple reason Villaraigosa and the city council have bungled and continued to bungle the job of cleaning up the bias in the Los Angeles Fire Department. I say bias, and not allegations of bias, after two big money lawsuits trials and payouts, a dozen or more known lawsuits charging bias and harassment in the department that are currently in the legal pipeline.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in announcing that it will conduct its own probe of racism and harassment in the department flatly said that there is strong evidence of bias in the department. Interim Fire Chief Douglas L. Barry quickly capitulated in the face of the federal probe and said that the department would cooperate with the feds.
Now I use the word known advisedly when I say that there are more than a dozen bias suits pending.
It's almost certain that are other potential claimants waiting in the wings and watching hawk like to see how the bias suits are going to come out. If the city suffers more court defeats and are forced to ladle out multi-million judgements, the betting odds are that more lawsuits will be dumped on the city's case docket. The taxpayers would have to shell out millions to cover the costs and the city treasury would plunge deeper in the red. Tony, got anything to say about Tennie Pierce now?
Yeah. I "got something to say about Tennie Pierce now." Are you listening?
Tennie Pierce is a first class race hustler in the style of Sharpton and Rev. Jackson. Blacks be tryin' to get reparations in the form of lawsuits, but the "Big Dog" didn't have a fire hydrant to piss on this time. The Veto by our mayor to block Tennie's payday is the only good thing he has done in office (I can't speak for what he does with Mirthala).
Even if the suits have merit, and Tennie Pierce's doesn't because he engaged in the same sort of stuff he's suing over, there's no way the amounts being levied against the city are fair.
If you've ever spent one day at an LAUSD middle or high school, especially those with mixed black and Hispanic populations, you'd know that what kids have to go through every day are far, far worse. And they're impressionable kids who are required to go to school, not choose it as a career.
Yes, racial and sexual "pranks" and discrimination must stop, they belong to another era when people made all kinds of ethnic jokes and played pranks and really thought it was fine.
Bamattre was fired, and it appears the LAFD is being actively revamped and retrained.
But the juries out to get some sense into their heads: all the money that goes to these "race-hustlers" and their lawyers, is money we don't have to fight fires and train new firefighters.
There's no doubt "race-hustling" continues all the time. Just today, Maxine Waters had a 2 1/2 hour "news conference," photo op, to decry the "racial injustice" of closing down Killer King -- left open too long because of racial intimidation by her, Yvonne Brentwood Burke, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and going back to previous Mayor Hahn. Bill Boyarsky has an editorial e: how these old-time black politicians learned how to milk race for their political longevity, and the new crop of claimanas and lawyers sure do, too.