Chief Leader – June 16, 2015
by SARAH DORSEY and RICHARD STEIER
Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro last week defended his controversial reassignment of the Fire Academy’s top two training officials, and reflected on a development he said he finds troubling—the recent leaks to the news media about the performance of individual firefighters or candidates, either in the Academy or on the job. He dismissed the idea presented by some firefighters that the leakers were whistleblowers.
Fall Guys?
Lieuts. Michael Cacciola and Peter Critsimilios, the longtime head of the Academy’s fitness unit and his deputy, were reassigned recently; at least two dozen trainers resigned from their teaching duties in protest. Some firefighters believe that as managers, the two were held responsible for leaks coming from people in their department, including several about women and people of color who were allegedly struggling in the Academy.
In an interview last week, Mr. Nigro denied that the reassignments had anything to do with the department leaks. He noted that he has made many personnel changes in his year-long tenure, starting with his appointment of a new Chief of Department and Deputy Commissioners. He attributed the resignations to people who “felt a personal allegiance towards” the longtime trainers.
But he also addressed complaints by some firefighters—including some of the trainers who quit in protest—that he had lowered training standards to allow more women and people of color to graduate.
Noting that two of his sons-in-law and three nephews are current firefighters, he said, “If someone were to think that I…in any way, shape or form would want to lower the standards when both of my daughters’ husbands are out there fighting fires, that alone should tell them that’s not my mission. My mission is to make it as fair as we possibly can while still maintaining the highest standards of any academy in the country.”
The accusations about lowering standards focused especially on one key task, the Functional Skills Training (FST), in which probies don full bunker gear and supplemental air and perform a series of job-related tasks. One female candidate appeared in a story by the New York Post shortly before graduation because her FST score would have allegedly disqualified her under rules that were in place in 2013 and 2014.
Modified Test’s Weight
The Commissioner strongly defended the FST as essential last December before a City Council committee concerned that the way it was administered put women at a disadvantage. If the training were scrapped, he said, something very similar would have to replace it.
But after a review by an outside consultant, PSI, he reportedly changed the order of the tasks for the class that graduated last month, and diminished the FST’s prominence as a graduation requirement. For two years, it had been a must-pass test, with each candidate needing a 75 percent to graduate. He returned it to the role it had had since 2008, when it made up a part of each candidate’s grade but was considered along with academics, a qualifying run, and other skills-based tests.
Last week, Mr. Nigro defended that decision, saying, “Our focus in training is to keep very high standards, but to ensure that every single thing we do is geared toward training a Firefighter. Not ice skaters, mountain climbers, rodeo cowboys—firefighters.”
As the U.S. Justice Department’s 2007 discrimination suit against the FDNY made clear, tests for employment, whether they’re written or physical, must be job-related, as defined by Federal standards. They must be as tough as the job demands, but not so difficult that only someone vastly overqualified could pass. A Firefighter test, for instance, would be considered discriminatory by the Federal government if it required the math skills of a physics professor.
Asked about the Academy training, Mr. Nigro defended it as “quite job-related.” He noted that “about 90 percent of the department”—those hired before 2008—were never timed on the FST.
Acclimate to Mask
That training was originally designed to accustom probies to doing strenuous activity while masked—because some members were removing their masks on the job. “And the way you can fail that activity is by running out of air, or taking the mask off,” Mr. Nigro said. “Not so much how fast you do it, because it’s not a race.”
The Commissioner issued an order last month harshly condemning the press leaks as “bring[ing] dishonor to the FDNY family.”
Last week, he said that his order referred to the types of leaks that have become common recently—information about individuals, including the woman who struggled to complete the FST and an African-American probie in the field who was accused of being afraid of fires.
Active and retired Firefighters in letters to THE CHIEF-LEADER, along with respondents to its online poll, have strongly supported the leakers, with some viewing them as whistleblowers. Asked if this attitude represents a shift in a culture that has traditionally protected its own, the Commissioner said, “…If someone has a bad day at a fire and maybe fails to do something they should have done, it has never been the way of the department to alert the media.”
‘We Don’t Do That’
“We don’t do that. We might come back to the firehouse and say, ‘Frank, why didn’t you get the roof? What the heck happened?’ Or the Captain’ll say, ‘I need to train Frank a little better.’ But we don’t…talk about one another [to the press] in such a fashion. I think it’s bad for the department to go that way.”
Mr. Nigro seemed to echo the complaints of the heads of the women’s and black fraternal groups, objecting to the release of the exact times and grades of probies’ performances on various Academy tasks.
“And unfortunately, these leaks seem to have been more directed at women and people of color than anyone else. That’s not a secret,” he added. “So I would hope that there aren’t people—and you know it’s a big department—that are still waging that war. Because that war is over. That’s not who we are anymore.”
He said he was “certainly not against [members] talking to the press” about topics other than the personal details of members.
Those who feel standards have been lowered “are looking, probably, for signs [of it],” he added. The Commissioner cited a survey of Captains after last month’s class entered firehouses.
“They thought they were terrific,” Mr. Nigro said. “If you think that the people getting assigned to you are terrific, they must be getting trained pretty well.”
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