Investigations
Federal Bureau of Investigation
Although Title VII prohibits employment discrimination based on race, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is no stranger to systemic discrimination. Currently, only 4% of the 13,000 FBI agents around the world are Black, with virtually no progressive change in the past three decades. At David Shaffer Law, PLLC, we are constructing a class-action lawsuit against the FBI. While this is no simple feat, there is power in numbers. We have filed three class actions against the FBI, and against ATF, the Secret Service, and the former Customs Service.
If you have been discriminated against as an FBI agent on the basis of race, we encourage you to fill out the following form (all information collected is protected under Attorney/Client privilege) and we look forward to fervently seeking justice alongside you with the help of your voice. We cannot stress enough how important your role plays in the future of race in federal law enforcement.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement
At David Shaffer Law, we are pursuing a class action against ICE for their lack of gender-normed physical tests and discriminating against our client and other female trainees on the basis of sex. While at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC), our client was not only faced with male-tailored physical tests, but also with the male-tailored instructors who singled her out multiple times for minor issues which were overlooked when the male trainees had similar issues. We filed her official, individual and class complaint through the Department of Homeland Security in early January 2021.
As women make up more than half of the U.S. population and account for 47% of all working Americans, they comprise just 13% of law enforcement officers and 15.5% of all sworn federal law enforcement officers (Reaves, 2012). Women in law enforcement have always been underrepresented for various reasons: masculine stigma, recruitment issues, hostile work environment, etc., but one measure that has been repeatedly seen to have a disparate impact on women are the physical examinations.
Within ICE, 71.9% are men and 28.1% are women (Alvarado, 2017). Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), unlike other federal law enforcement agencies like the DEA and the FBI, does not use gender-normed physical examinations. Gender-normed tests set different raw cutoffs for male and female applicants such that each class would be expected to have roughly equal pass rates, making it more equitable for women.
We are hoping to retain more female ICE agents with similar gender discrimination issues to expand our case. Therefore, if you, or anyone you know, have been retaliated against from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, please reach out to us as soon as possible.
Federal law enforcement agencies must create an organizational culture that does not tolerate harassment and discrimination and implement policies that highlight women’s contribution in this male-dominated field. While it’ll take a lot more work to change the masculine identity of law enforcement, we believe that the one step in the direction of full gender equity is the inclusion of gender-normed physical tests.
Sources:
Yu, Helen H. “An Examination of Women in Federal Law Enforcement: An Exploratory Analysis of the Challenges They Face in the Work Environment.” Feminist Criminology 10, no. 3 (July 2015): 259–78. https://doi.org/10.1177/1557085114545824.
Reaves, B. A. (2012). Federal law enforcement officers, 2008 (NCJ 238250). Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin, U.S. Department of Justice.