Justice Dept: minority hiring and retention: "We would sue employers for having numbers like that."

I-Team: Justice Attorneys | - Friday May 04, 2007 5:50 pm

But our investigation has found that the Justice Department is missing a key component in its mission to protect civil rights - DIVERSITY � diversity in the attorney ranks to prosecute cases.

Congressman John Conyers: "They need someone to investigate them."

The I-Team has learned that since 2003...the criminal section within the Civil Rights Division has not hired a single black attorney to replace those who have left. Not one.

As a result, the current face of civil rights prosecutions looks like this: Out of fifty attorneys in the Criminal Section - only two are black. The same number the criminal section had in 1978 - even though the size of the staff has more than doubled.

Congressman John Conyers - Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee - was amazed to learn the Civil Rights Division has so few black attorneys trying criminal cases.

Congressman John Conyers: "They don't have the diversity that we're saying is required in the country in businesses and of course in the Department of Justice itself."

We obtained Justice Dept. internal records showing very few black or Hispanic attorneys hired in the last few years.

Congressman John Conyers: "Zeros, zeros zeros, point seven percent. They�re incredibly low."

For more than a decade, Richard Ugelow was a supervisor at the Civil Rights section that sues government employers for discrimination in hiring and promotion.

Richard Ugelow: "You can't operate like that. We're hypocrites." Professor Ugelow now teaches law at American University. We showed him the Justice Department's statistics on minority hiring.

Richard Ugelow: "We would sue employers for having numbers like that."

None of this should come as a surprise to the Justice Department. In 2002, it hired KPMG, an international consulting firm to analyze the diversity of its workforce.

It issued this 186-page report finding the department had "significant diversity issues", that "minorities perceive unfairness," are "significantly under-represented in management ranks," and "more likely to leave than whites." ...