A Brooklyn former Marine claims the city used a racially biased psych evaluation to boot him and other black candidates from the city’s sheriff’s academy.
Barry Brown was one of five blacks in a class of 15 accepted into the academy in 2013. The five were later fired based on the psychological assessments, he charges in a lawsuit.
Brown, who spent nine years as a reservist in the US Marines and has a bachelor’s degree in finance, sought the job as a sheriff, a position in which officers carry guns and are overseen by the city Finance Department, after the company he worked for folded in the 2008 economic meltdown.
Evaluators were fixated on his divorce and seemed to hold the split with his wife against him, says Brown, a father of two teenagers.
Brown admits it “wasn’t the best divorce” but says financial pressures and job loss simply undid their union. Police were called twice during the contentious split, information he freely shared with the psychologists assessing him, he said.
“I didn’t feel it was anything that should be hidden. I was never arrested,” he said. “They asked if we had gone to counseling . . . One of the things I found strange, on the second interview, they asked to have my ex-wife speak on my behalf.”
The marital counseling had been his idea but was ultimately unsuccessful, he says, and the evaluators, who didn’t contact his prior employers, blamed him for the failed union, he claimed.
Those giving the assessments claimed there was “sufficient concern about his coping skills, stress tolerance and interpersonal skills to warrant disqualification,” Brown said in a Brooklyn federal court lawsuit filed against the city.
Other sheriff candidates “had some issues, there were other people in the class who had drug issues and had arrests” and were hired, he claimed.
Of the seven white candidates in his academy class with similar backgrounds, just three were canned, while two Hispanics and one Asian candidate completed the hiring process, said Brown.
Black candidates were more likely to be rated as having “poor judgment, poor credibility and failure to take responsibility for past problematic behavior,” according to court papers.
Several of the fired candidates went on to work for other law-enforcement agencies, but the 43-year-old Brown says he is past age requirements for many agencies.