Fire Department Oddity

A few days ago, we posted a story about a fire department official under investigation for having copies of a promotional exam in his possession and making it available to certain persons for a price. We ended up with a ton of comments and learned an interesting bit of info:

• Sadly the fire dept has appendix G in our labor contract "Copies of written examinations will be made available to the Community Advisory Board".

We also spoke to a number of firefighters and heard that their Department canceled the upcoming Fire Lieutenant test, then reinstated it without comment, based on this "appendix G." The investigation itself was based on another one of those "statistical anomaly clusters" that seem to pop up with astonishing regularity whenever the City of Chicago offers a promotional exam. Somehow, upwards of 35 of the top fifty spots in the last exam went to persons who attended the church that runs this "Community Advisory Board" and counts a Deputy Fire Commissioner among its members.

Call us cynical, but making copies of an exam available to a "board" prior to the actual examination can only be an invitation to cheat. And if the "cluster" numbers prove to be accurate, the odds would be even more laughable that the 1987 CPD Exam-Scam of 13.8 trillion-to-one that this was a legit test.

Don't the citizens of Chicago deserve to have the best and brightest public safety personnel protecting them, their families and their property day in and day out? Wouldn't that kind of be accepted practice seeing as we pay an outrageous amount of taxes and fees to live in this paradise? But then, if you look at who the mayor is, who he surrounds himself with, and what he's done over the past 20 years, you shouldn't be surprised.