Republicans and Democrats come and go in the U.S. Department of Justice, but “disparate-impact” theory remains alive and well, as in the case of a new consent decree summarized by a correspondent of NRO’s John Derbyshire (Apr. 4):

“In February, the Justice Department sent a letter to Virginia Beach, concluding that the Beach Police Department has ‘engaged in a pattern or practice of discrimination’ against black and Hispanics applicants.

“The only evidence cited were results of a math exam given to all police recruits. It showed a wide gap between the passing rates for white applicants and the passing rates for black and Hispanics.

“About 85 percent of white applicants passed the math test from 2002 to mid-2005, compared with 59 percent of blacks and 66 percent of Hispanics.”

More details from the article in question (Duane Bourne, “Virginia Beach agrees to change the way it scores police math exams”, The Virginian-Pilot, Apr. 3):

The Justice Department questioned whether math is relevant to the daily duties of a police officer. The city agreed to eliminate the 70 percent cutoff score for the math part of the test….

At least one city official, Councilwoman Reba McClanan, said she does not agree with the settlement.

“One of the things that’s insulting about it is they’re telling us we don’t have a right to insist on certain standards,” McClanan said. “My feeling was we should hang in there. We want fairness and we want as many minorities working for our departments as possible, but we also want them to meet certain standards.”
…

The city will also pay up to $160,000 to applicants who flunked the old standards.

P.S. At Workplace ProfBlog, Paul Secunda spells out something left implicit in the above summary: the Justice Department’s actions are a fairly straightforward application of the current state of “disparate-impact” law; if you see nothing amiss with the present state of that branch of the law, you may see nothing amiss with the outcome (Apr. 10).

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