"LAFD Cheating Is Tip Of The Iceberg" by Daniel Guss
@TheGussReport - Last week, The Guss Report got its second-highest readership traffic since moving to the Substack platform, when I exclusively exposed a recent test cheating scandal at the Los Angeles Fire Department. But the readership traffic title still belongs to the LAFD sexual harassment exposé I exclusively kicked off last October, that resulted in the abrupt retirement of Chief Deputy Armando Hogan, who was likely going to be Mayor Karen Bass’s next Fire Chief.
The beleaguered, understaffed agency has yet to turn over public records related to the cheating scandal, and Bass, City Council president Paul Krekorian and Councilmember Monica Rodriguez, who chairs the council’s Public Safety Committee, have refused to respond to questions.
If they were honest officials, they’d have already fired the cheating first responders.
But they haven’t, because insiders say that members of a particular LAFD “stakeholders’ group,” i.e. firefighters who may be of the same ethnicity, got the top test scores in numbers significantly higher than the LAFD and the city’s Personnel Department (which administered the test) would historically anticipate in a non-rigged test.
In simpler terms, the affiliated cheating firefighters were too dumb to realize that a bunch of extremely high scores would raise red flags, and that it would have been a good idea to get a few questions wrong in order to make their collective dishonesty not so obvious.
Instead, the LAFD, City Council and Mayor Bass seem content with just canceling the scores, giving everyone a Mulligan on the test and just saying “oh well.”
It will be interesting to see how well the firefighters who got the highest scores on this test perform when they are forced to retake the test in person and at the same time and location.
The Guss Report has resubmitted its public records request for the canceled test scores and will line them up against the new test scores after the same firefighters retake it.
While the city government farts a good game about getting past the Jose Huizar and Mitch Englander corruption scandals; the Martinez-Cedillo-de León racism scandal; and its failures on homelessness, crime, deadly and corrupt LA Animal Services and more, first responders cheating on a captain’s test is deeply disturbing on a whole other level. These are the people we need to extricate us from car crashes or don 40lbs of gear to get us out of smoke-filled buildings engulfed in flames. There’s not supposed to be room for dishonesty in any of this.
But by staying silent, our elected officials tip their hand that they prefer that the scandal — and this journalist — just go away so nobody would be the wiser.
Thankfully, honest insiders made sure that cheating got exposed.
City Hall tried to cover it up because they’d have trouble with the union and affiliated organizations representing the cheaters if they didn’t. And since City Hall marinates in a steady diet of equity and diversity every day in lieu of classic concepts like merit, skill and integrity, exposing the “stakeholders’ group” is a non-starter for them. Having a spine like that could cost such a politician campaign donations and phone banking support the next time they run for re-election or higher office.
So here’s how the cheating went down.
The Personnel Department recently administered the LAFD captain’s test online even though the pandemic had long-since been considered over. They refuse to state why the test was given online and what safeguards it took to prevent cheating.
Anyone scheduled to take the test simply had to do so between the hours of 8am and 10pm. Members of the “stakeholders’ group” apparently used a few proverbial guinea pigs to take the test early and distribute the questions to its other members.
The test questions and answers were shared in at least two ways.
One was that they were openly posted on fire station whiteboards, which not only advanced the cheating, it simultaneously indoctrinated young firefighters into a racketeering mindset shared by some at the LAFD.
The other way was that test questions were shared via email. The email chain eventually made its way to some who took the test honestly — including some who may have spent thousands of dollars on study courses conducted by former or retired LAFD members — and understandably felt cheated by those who scored higher because they knew the questions and answers in advance.
Simple as that.
Also, there is evidence that the LAFD knew about the cheating weeks earlier than the January 29th date that it claims.
This is hardly the only controversy at the LAFD, but we’ll keep that powder dry for the time being because there is a much darker and disturbing story to share from there. And Bass, Krekorian, Rodriguez and LAFD Chief Kristin Crowley — for starters — dodged those questions, as well.
But what few people know is that that story was captured on video and makes cheating on a captain’s test look like a day at the beach.
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(Daniel Guss, MBA, was nominated for three 2022 LA Press Club awards and was a runner-up in 2021 and 2020. He is City Editor for the Mayor Sam network, and has been a featured contributor for CityWatchLA, KFI AM-640, iHeartMedia, 790-KABC, Cumulus Media, KCRW 89.9 FM, KRLA 870 AM, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Magazine, Movieline Magazine, Emmy Magazine, Los Angeles Business Journal, Pasadena Star-News, Los Angeles Downtown News and the Los Angeles Times in its sports, opinion, entertainment and Sunday Magazine sections among other publishers.)