In his suit, Larry Jacobs, now 48, accused top fire officials of a racially motivated humiliation campaign starting in 2005, in which he was kept apart and told not to eat with or speak to firefighters. He also said he was relegated to hard labor in lieu of training for nearly a year.

The goal, his suit said, was to humiliate him into dropping out of the department.

The city and department officials defended the menial labor as being not unusual for injured rookies. They denied race had anything to do with it.

According the city attorney’s motion to dismiss the case, Jacobs was known as “Conspiracy Theory” by his fellow rookies and never suffered financially from his supposed mistreatment.

Jacobs’ account of abuse got an unlikely boost from veteran firefighters who witnessed what one of them called a deliberate effort to get Jacobs and two other African American rookie firefighters to drop out of the 29-member rookie class in 2005.

While Jacobs persevered and is still in the department, the two others in the class gave up.

Years of abuse alleged

According to the legal filings, Tom Siragusa – head of training at the time and currently an assistant chief – declared to his staff at a meeting that the training program had gone soft and that more recruits needed to flunk to restore the program’s reputation among other fire departments.

Jacobs – who was in the first class Siragusa commanded in May 2005 – alleged that he was subjected to three years of abuse to get him to flunk. He said the campaign began when he questioned why a training official had failed him on a knot-tying test – a test he ultimately passed by tying the exact same knot.

By that time, he had passed 67 out of 75 tests – scoring 100 percent on many of them – but had logged so many deficiencies in the knot-tying category that he was on the verge of flunking out.

After belatedly telling officials about having injured his shoulder while hoisting a ladder, Jacobs was taken out of training and put on light duty. The city attorney’s office said Jacobs was being investigated for reporting his injury too late under department regulations and could have been dismissed, but he stayed on.

Instead, Jacobs was put to work, first painting outside in near-100-degree heat and becoming what one fire official declared was “probably the highest-paid janitor in the city,” Jacobs’ suit said.

He was posted at the department’s Treasure Island training academy – but not to be trained. Here, Jacobs said, he was segregated – ordered not to speak to his fellow rookies or dine with them or other fire officials. He ate in his car.

Manual labor

Over 10 months, Jacobs said, he was provided only a toothbrush to do cleaning. His first assignment was the 7-by-6-foot kitchen floor – a job that took eight hours. He then used the brush to scrub clean the bathroom toilets and lockers.

Fire officials, according to the suit, took to calling him “house boy.” When he was not scrubbing, Jacobs said, he was told to weed and clean the academy’s 8-acre grounds – a job for which a private crew had been paid $200,000 before budget cuts. Despite his shoulder injury, Jacobs said, he was made to singlehandedly shovel up loose gravel and debris. He tended to the staff’s barbecue, groomed the baseball diamond and organized the clothing depot.

Even after he was judged fit by doctors, he was told there was no spot for him to be trained and he continued manual labor. Even after he completed his academy training, the abuse continued, according to his suit.

For instance, fire officials ordered that he submit to back-to-back drug tests. And when he passed those, the suit said, they made him repeatedly take a test to prove his ability to prepare a fire hose for use.

The trouble was, according to the suit, they would tie the hose in knots and take apart critical pieces before giving Jacobs 10 minutes to prepare the hose.

Other firefighters did not have to untangle or reassemble the hose in similar tests, the suit said. He failed the 10-minute test four times. Only on the fifth time – during a test that was witnessed by an observer from the Black Firefighters Association group armed with a video camera – did Jacobs pass the test.

Supervisors to decide

Jacobs blamed Chief Joanne Hayes-White for failing to stop the harassment campaign. While the chief did intervene, the improvements in his treatment were only temporary and the abuse soon resumed, according to the suit.

The settlement has been approved by the fire commission and awaits final action by the Board of Supervisors.

Jaxon Van Derbeken is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: jvanderbeken@sfchronicle.com

Article source: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Tentative-settlement-in-black-SF-firefighter-s-4795725.php

The report from San Diego’s DataQuick highlights how the foreclosure crisis appears to be subsiding after running rampant for five years.

“For more than a year, the general trend has been down” for legal filings that indicate mortgage distress, said DataQuick analyst Andrew LePage.

There are several reasons that foreclosure activity is trending down. As home values have risen over the past year, fewer homeowners are underwater, which means they can more easily refinance or sell their homes if they have trouble keeping up with their mortgage.

Financial hardship is also diminishing. “The other big factors are the pickup in the economy and the improvements in job growth that keep people from getting in trouble in the first place,” LePage said.

On top of that, various new laws and legal settlements between banks and the government encourage lenders to pursue alternatives to foreclosure, such as loan modifications and short sales (selling for less than is owed on the mortgage).

While LePage noted that the effects of the law and settlements are hard to measure, the net impact is fewer foreclosures.

Most subprimes gone

Moreover, the bulk of risky subprime loans have already gone through foreclosure. Mortgages issued from 2008 “were safer and saner,” LePage said, meaning they are unlikely to have the sharp payment spikes of teaser-rate subprimes.

For the fourth quarter, DataQuick reported that 5,399 households in the Bay Area received default notices, the first step in the foreclosure process. That was down 46.1 percent from the same quarter of 2011. About half of default notices become foreclosures.

Although lenders can file notices of default once borrowers are three months behind, DataQuick said that Californians receiving the notices were a median of eight months in arrears on their primary mortgages.

Statewide, notices of default were down 37.9 percent in the quarter, to 38,212.

Trustee deeds, the final step of foreclosure, were issued for 2,765 Bay Area homes in the fourth quarter. That was down 42.8 percent from the same quarter of 2011.

Statewide, trustee deeds were down 32.4 percent, to 21,127 in the fourth quarter.

Looking at the full year also showed declines. The Bay Area had 30,046 default notices in 2012, down 30.7 percent from 2011. The nine-county region had 1,907 trustee deeds in 2012, a 41.2 percent decline from 2011.

While the numbers are the lowest in six years, many homeowners still struggle to keep their houses.

Oakland’s Peggy Hart, 61, for instance, said income from her day care business took a big hit a few years ago. Three years ago, when she first applied for a loan modification, bank representatives told her to stop paying her mortgage and she complied, she said. Wells Fargo gave her a loan modification early on, but the payments were still too high and she was unable to keep up, she said.

Changes are tough

Now her business and her income have rebounded, but her efforts to get a loan modification have been frustrating and unsuccessful, she said.

“I’m able to pay, I want to pay my mortgage,” she said. “I told (Wells) on the phone, ‘Please let this happen for me.’ “

Hart lives with her two sons, granddaughter and a baby great-grandson in the house, where they also run the day care. She owes about $200,000 on the house, which various real estate sites estimate is worth at least $390,000.

“Wells Fargo continues to work with borrowers on mortgage modifications and other options that may help them remain in their homes and avoid foreclosure when possible,” the bank said in a statement. “We have been working with Ms. Hart for over three years to identify an option that would allow her to retain this home. We were able to provide her with some temporary assistance in September 2009 while we continued to look at home retention options.”

Both foreclosures and notices of default remain more common in lower-cost areas, DataQuick said.

Over the past five years, 1.1 million of California’s 8.7 million houses and condos received a foreclosure notice, it said. Of those, 780,000 were actually lost to foreclosure. The others were either sold or the payments were made current.

At the courthouse auction where the final step of foreclosure takes place, about 42 percent of properties in the fourth quarter were purchased by investors, DataQuick said. That was up from 31.2 percent a year earlier.

Fewer foreclosures

Fewer people in the Bay Area and California lost homes to foreclosure in the fourth quarter compared with a year earlier; and fewer received notices that they were behind in payments. For the full year, both notices of default (the first step in the foreclosure process) and trustee deeds (the final step of foreclosure) were down compared with 2011.

Notices of Default

Houses and condos, fourth quarter

Trustee deeds recorded

Houses and condos, fourth quarter

Sources: DataQuick, DQNews.com

Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: csaid@sfchronicle.com

Article source: http://www.sfgate.com/realestate/article/Foreclosures-drop-in-Bay-Area-California-4218858.php