U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi has directed the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division to dismiss lawsuits against jurisdictions pertaining to the hiring of police officers and firefighters.
“American communities deserve firefighters and police officers to be chosen for their skill and dedication to public safety – not to meet DEI quotas,” Bondi said in a statement.
While the DOJ noted there is “no evidence of intentional discrimination — only statistical disparities,” the former Biden administration “branded the aptitude tests at issue in these cases as discriminatory in an effort to advance a DEI agenda.” The DOJ further stated the Biden administration “sought to coerce cities into conducting DEI-based hiring in response and spending millions of dollars in taxpayer funds for payouts to previous applicants who had scored lower on the tests, regardless of qualifications.”
The DOJ’s chief of staff, Chad Mizelle, declared that hiring first responders and law enforcement “must be based on MERIT.”
“Safety has to come before DEI,” Mizelle said. “These proposed consent decrees sought to penalize fire and police departments for using race-neutral hiring tools. There was NO evidence that the departments engaged in intentional discrimination.”
The DOJ official explained that “some of these cases involved written tests that required only a 70% score to pass and involved subjects such as reading comprehension and report-writing skills.”
“Despite a total lack of evidence of intentional discrimination, these cases accused those departments of discrimination based on alleged statistical disparities,” Mizelle continued. “As a result, the Biden-era DOJ sought to force fire and police departments to engage in DEI hiring, to pay millions of dollars in taxpayer money to applicants who had not been hired, and to stop hiring on merit.”
