Apartheid. USA 1988

[p. 159]

January 13, 1988:

A Supreme Court case arose out of a job discrimination claim between white New York City police officers on the one hand and minority group officers on the other. Black and Hispanic officers account for 21 percent of the officers that took, for instance, in 1984 a test to be promoted to sergeant. Only 6.5 of the group received high enough grades to be advanced, but the black and Hispanic officers sued the City, maintaining that the test had been racially discriminatory and not job-related. Under a settlement all officers who were eligible for promotion on the basis of their scores on an examination were promoted without regard to race, along with enough lower-scoring black and Hispanic officers to make the racial make-up of the new class of sergeants proportional the number of black and Hispanic officers who took the test. The settlement was spurred in part by a pressing need in the department for more sergeants. But then white officers who had not been promoted because they didn't achieve high enough scores, filed an appeal now before the Supreme Court. They said the earlier settlement discriminated against them because black and Hispanic officers who had received the same scores or even lower had been promoted under the settlement, in spite of these lower scores, to uphold certain percentages of minority sergeants on the force. The Supreme Court remained deadlocked on the issue with a 4 to 4 vote.^201.

201. The New York Times, from a report by Stuart Taylor Jr