Veteran firefighter Douglas L. Barry will be named acting chief of the Los Angeles Fire Department today, the first African American in the agency's history to assume the top job.
Barry, 53, will take over Jan. 1 for outgoing Fire Chief William Bamattre, who resigned last week amid uproar over harassment and racial discrimination in the Fire Department.
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's senior advisors said the mayor expects Barry, a 31-year department veteran, to work aggressively toward ending discriminatory practices that have resulted in multimillion-dollar lawsuits and triggered two critical city audits.
"The mayor wanted to find a person for the interim who is a change agent and ready to create momentum and action for the department, who knows it well, who has served it well, and also who has the leadership skills and shared vision for excellence," said Robin Kramer, the mayor's chief of staff.
Barry's elevation to acting chief also serves an important political purpose for Villaraigosa, who has come under withering criticism from some African Americans for vetoing a $2.7-million settlement granted to a black firefighter who had sued the city for racial discrimination.
Those critics complained that Villaraigosa yielded to public outrage over the size of the settlement to Tennie Pierce, whose station house dinner was laced with dog food by other firefighters in 2004, rather than deal with the broader question of discrimination in the department.
Appointing a black chief, even on an interim basis, could go a long way toward mollifying some of those critics.
But some of the city's African American leaders viewed Barry's selection as only a first step in a broader effort to address hazing and harassment practices that have defied solution.
"Just appointing an African American is not enough. It has to go much further," said Earl Ofari Hutchinson, president of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable. "The key is the support and the tools and an aggressive attack on the culture of racism in the department."
The interim chief, now an assistant fire chief managing the day-to-day operations of the department's Fire Prevention Bureau, will take over an organization that has grown more diverse in the last decade but is still riven by accusations of racism, sexism and a hostile work environment.
'Agent of change'
