Larry Jacobs joined the San Francisco Fire Department in 2005 and experienced racial hazing at the fire academy, including being told to clean toilets with toothbrushes and being segregated during meals. Jacobs reported the incidents and won a $175,000 racial discrimination settlement in 2013. He says that after speaking up he was passed over for promotions five times and faced retaliation. A court found merit in his claims in 2022, and the city lost on appeal. The city has now settled for $1.2 million, described as one of the largest whistleblower settlements in San Francisco history.
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.
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.
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