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Dayton throws out written police exam scores, will rely on oral interviews only

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By Lucas Sullivan, Staff Writer Updated 11:26 AM Friday, April 15, 2011

DAYTON — The city of Dayton plans to discard the test scores of the 748 people who passed its police recruit exam in November and will instead hire officers based only on a subjective oral interview — a change meant to improve the city’s ability to hire more minorities.

The announcement comes after the U.S. Department of Justice forced the city to lower its passing score to allow for more minorities into the hiring pool as part of a federal discrimination lawsuit the city settled in 2009.

Those scores are no longer relevant and all candidates are now on equal footing. The oral exam will consist of five situation-based questions asked by an expert panel and last 30 minutes per candidate.

Only those who passed the written exams are allowed to take the oral exam.

The move is arguably the most significant change in the city’s hiring process of police and firefighters in decades. It was made based on a recommendation by Fire & Police Selection Inc., based in Folsom, Calif. FPSI was hired by the city for $150,000 to revamp Dayton’s police and fire exams, said Jim Moore, the city’s interim civil service director.

Moore said in previous years, the oral interview was conducted by the police department and would be factored in with the written exam results.

FPSI was contracted because it had experience with federal discrimination lawsuits, Civil Service officials said.

Dayton Police Union President Randy Beane called the change “outrageous.” He said it circumvents the city’s rule of one hiring practice where candidates must be hired one at a time based on a testing score from best to worst.

“There’s not going to be any objectiveness in the process,” he said. “We are checking with our attorney to see if this is legal.”

City Commissioner Dean Lovelace welcomed the change and said an oral exam can sometimes better reflect a candidate’s worthiness. “If this change increases our ability to hire more minorities, I am for it,” he said. “I have maintained the written test shouldn’t be the only weight in the process.”

Interviews to be completed in June

The city began notifying the 748 who passed the exam by mail this week. Those moving on will have to pass a preliminary background check before participating in the oral interview.

The panel will then score the applicant’s answers and the process will be completed in early June.

Those who pass the oral exam must then pass a polygraph test and psychological and physical exams before being ranked on a hiring list.

Moore disagreed the hiring change was meant to circumvent the city’s hiring rules mandated in its charter. But when asked if this creates more wiggle room to subjectively hire candidates, Moore said, “that might very well be the case. We are reacting to the consent decree which states that we are not to engage in a selection process that has a disparate impact on a certain race,” he said.

The Department of Justice sued Dayton in 2008, claiming its hiring practices for police and fire positions discriminated against minorities, mainly blacks. Dayton has since spent more than $500,000 settling terms of the lawsuit, which included new civil service exams and paying some black applicants who failed the 2006 test that was found to be invalid.

The city last month agreed to lower the passing scores on the two-part written exams to allow 258 additional people into the passing pool after the DOJ rejected the city’s first passing score proposal. Applicants had to correctly answer 58 percent of questions on an 86-question exam and get 63 percent right of 102 questions on the other.

Of the 748 who passed, at least 111 are black, 564 are white and 19 are Hispanic. Some did not declare their race.

The DOJ’s rejection has indefinitely postponed the firefighters exam that was originally scheduled earlier this month and civil service officials said they might not use FPSI to develop the firefighters exam. It is unclear if FPSI’s services will be dropped because of the DOJ’s initial rejection of the test results.

The city’s police and fire ranks continue to shrink toward all-time lows as a result of not being able to replace dozens of retirees and other departures. Of the roughly 650 police and firefighters in the city, less than 40 are black in a city with more than 50,000 black residents.

City Manager Tim Riordan said Wednesday he is hopeful the city can hire police officers in early 2012, but seemed less optimistic about hiring firefighters a few months later.