“What I would offer to you and to the public is to look at where we are in six months and see whether we’ve made the changes that I’m committing to make today,” said County chair Deborah Kafoury. “Changing a culture of 6,000 plus employees is not going to happen over night…but I am going to fix it.”
Kafoury made that pledge after acknowledging last month that the county subjected employees of color to institutional racism. The county fired 5% of its almost 500 black employees in the last two years, according to a county report. And black employees were fired after completing their job probation more than 2.5 times as often as other county employees.