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Monday, December 26, 1994     Page: 10A

Negative side to affirmative action for city fire and police
   
When you run a Sunday editorial (Dec. 11) about Wilkes-Barre’s all-white
police and fire departments using phrases such as “the era before Jackie
    Robinson” and “a legacy of slavery,” you discredit by implication the
managements of those departmentsAt the risk of seeming simple-minded, I would
like to ask some questions which your piece does not attempt to address,
though you could have easily done so:
   
What is the black population of Wilkes-Barre? I remember hearing somewhere
that it is around 1 percent, as compared to about 15 percent nationally. Half
of that one percent are women, who do not generally seek out law enforcement
careers.
   
How many blacks have applied for positions as police officers or
firefighters, passed the tests, and accepted the position afterwards? Have
any, in meeting all these criteria, been rejected?
   
Should the police department, recently denied $80,000 to replace 1930’s
technology with modern semiautomatic pistols, spend money (lots of it) to
recruit non-local people to fill jobs now filled by local people?
   
Does Los Angeles or New York, Chicago or Philadelphia, enjoy healthy race
relations because it has a large number of black police officers? Recent
events prove otherwise.
   
A judge who is fond of social engineering may someday force our local
government to create purely for its symbolic value a costly recruiting program
benefitting no one. Then local mothers and fathers will have to explain why
their adult sons and daughters didn’t get the badge they had wanted so badly
and why someone who had to find Wilkes-Barre on a map got it instead.
   
Until then, people of good sense can be grateful that our “backward” city
has been allowed the luxury of hiring without racial bias.
   
David Parmelee
   
Dallas