A longtime SF firefighter who’s now 60 years old just got a $1.2 million settlement, saying he was repeatedly passed over for promotions after his 2013 whistleblower case reporting racial discrimination.
Things did not get off on the right foot for firefighter Larry Jacobs when he started with the SF Fire Department in 2005. The way he tells it, he and two other Black firefighters were subjected to racial hazing at the fire academy, being told to clean toilets with toothbrushes, and segregated from other trainees during meals, with Jacobs having to eat in his car. He said the training facility “felt like a plantation,” and that he was called “the cleaning boy” and “this houseboy.” Jacobs won a $175,000 settlement in 2013 for racial discrimination.
That was not the end of Larry Jacobs’s troubles. As the years went on, Jacobs says he was passed over for promotions five times, and alleges it was because he spoke up over these fire academy incidents. Now retired, Jacobs’s claims were credible enough that he won a court case over it in 2022, though the city appealed. And the city has now settled with Jacobs for $1.2 million. NBC Bay Area describes it as “one of the largest whistleblower settlements in San Francisco history.”
“I did everything by the book, because I got the feeling — and no one ever said anything — but I just knew that,” Jacobs told NBC Bay Area in an interview. “I just felt that the command staff, and some of the people that ran the department, wasn't happy with me.”
Indeed, in his second lawsuit against the city over his repeatedly denied promotion requests, one of Jacobs’s commanders testified that Jacobs was called a “shit disturber,” and his higher-ups said “we don’t need that kind of trouble” in the arson unit in which Jacobs was trying to get hired.
The City of San Francisco lost the original 2022 case, also lost on appeal, and is now settling for $1.2 million, which the City Attorney’s Office told NBC Bay Area “an appropriate resolution given the inherent costs of continued litigation.”
Jacobs’s attorney Jane Brunner argued that the settlement is a sign that the SF Fire Department still has deep cultural problems, as they still don’t admit any wrongdoing.
“The department needs to be fixed,” she said to NBC Bay Area. “You don't fix a problem until you acknowledge a problem.”
Image: SAN FRANCISCO, CA – APRIL 22, 2018: San Francisco Fire Department logo on side of ambulance (Getty Images)
