The Fence - Dick Lehr [37]
The men claimed that Boston’s hiring and recruitment practices—and those at every police department in Massachusetts for that matter—were discriminatory. They argued that the civil service examination was biased and violated their constitutional rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. The federal judge agreed, ruling in Castro v. Beecher that the exams “were discriminatory against minorities which did not share the prevailing white culture.” The bias may not have been intentional, the judge said, but it had nonetheless resulted in years of an “unconscious lopsidedness of the [police] recruitment.” Determined to come up with a strong remedy that would have an immediate impact, the judge in 1973 approved a plan known as the Castro decree.
The plan required the creation of two pools of applicants: One group contained blacks and Hispanics, and the second group contained nonminority applicants. The applicants in each group were then ranked—with rankings affected by several factors. The most obvious was the exam score: the higher the score, the higher the ranking. Being a veteran of the armed services and being a relative of a public safety officer killed or injured in the line of duty were other factors that boosted rankings.
The two applicant pools were then merged into a single master list. The first name on the new list was the highest ranking minority applicant, and the second name was the highest ranking non-minority applicant. To fill openings, the police department went down the list—in effect, alternating between the two groups. The first opening went to a minority applicant, the second to a nonminority. The system was intended to “facilitate the appointment…of one minority policeman for each white policeman.” No one disputed that the plan favored minority applicants, who, by virtue of merging the two pools, ended up ranked higher than a white applicant who had a higher score on the exam or was related to an officer killed in the line of duty. That was the whole point of the affirmative action plan—to use race to correct a gross imbalance in the racial makeup of the force. The goal was to achieve “rough parity,” where the percentage of minorities on the Boston police force mirrored the percentage of minorities living in the city.
Mike Cox was a second grader at St. Mary’s in Brookline when the Castro decree’s quota system first went into effect in 1973. Fifteen years later he sat down to take the civil service exam under the revised system with the hope of becoming a police officer. As always, his older sisters had been looking out for him. Lillian not only showed Mike the recruitment ad in the newspaper, she got him the forms he needed to apply.
Lillian was responding to an interest Mike had had since he was a boy, even if he was uncertain whether he could ever measure up to the job. “It seemed like a very difficult job,” Mike said. Self-doubts aside, the Castro decree had guaranteed a police job was no longer a long shot for a young black man. By 1988, the look of the police force had changed radically. Of the 1,908 officers, 365 were blacks and Hispanics—making up 20.7 percent of the department’s total workforce.
Mike became excited about applying. “It was an opportunity to do something which I would probably learn to like, and I always had an admiration for law and the legal field.” Mike was also impressed by the pay. “It wasn’t bad either.” Earning power was no small thing to him in his new role as provider. The year of 1988 was proving to be a big and hurried one—a personal trifecta covering marriage, family, and career.
Mike and Kimberly were married on June