When government functionaries want to indulge in naked racial discrimination, a consent decree is a convenient legal fig leaf. On Feb. 26, for the first time in four years, the Los Angeles Fire Department offered a written test to would-be firefighters. White applicants were not invited to take the test unless they had registered for it in 1989 or earlier, but there were no such time limits on minority applicants. The test-taking rules are written into a consent decree the city signed in 1981. Don't blame us, the city is saying to thousands of people who were denied a chance to take the test because their skin was the wrong color. We're just following orders. ``We are simply complying with the law. Our hands are really tied. That's what we explain to the candidates,'' said Larry Niles, chief of the Police and Fire Selection Division of the City Personnel Department. This is quite simply wrong. A consent decree is an agreement made to settle a lawsuit. It's filed with the court, so it's legally enforceable just as a contract is, but it is not a law. The parties can go back to court and change it, if circumstances change. Indeed, that's already happened once with this case, which was originally settled in 1974. And circumstances have changed. When the original lawsuit was filed more than 20 years ago, only 4 percent of city firefighters were minorities (for the purposes of this discussion, that means ``Blacks, Hispanics and Asian-Americans''). There can be no doubt that discrimination against them, and in favor of whites, had more than a little to do with that figure. So it was entirely appropriate that the city be required to root out discriminatory practices, and to recruit aggressively among those formerly excluded [-] the original intent of affirmative action. What the city agreed to do, however, was to set an interim goal of hiring 50 percent minorities annually until the Fire Department was ``more representative of the racial and ethnic composition of the local community.'' Well, now it is more representative, with 37 percent of the department coming from the specified groups [-] a nine-fold increase in 20 years. The department doesn't precisely match the demographics of the city, mostly because the city has been changing faster than department personnel. But then, why should it match? One can argue for more Latino and African-American police officers because the crime rate in those groups is disproportionately higher, but that argument hardly applies to firefighting. Houses do not burn down in culturally distinct ways. And when yours is burning, you don't much care who is holding the hose. So the question is, how long is this interim supposed to last? Two decades of a 50-percent minority set-aside ought to be time enough to get the message out. Because the department has changed so much, city officials could, if they wished, attempt to negotiate a change in the terms of the consent decree, or even to have it set aside as no longer relevant. They might not find it so hard to do. In 1989, the Supreme Court ruled that white male firefighters in Birmingham, Ala., had the right to sue to overturn a consent decree giving preferences to minorities and women if they had not had a part in negotiating it. A number of cases have established that race-conscious policies are permissible if they are narrowly tailored to remedy past discrimination, but fixed quota plans, even if the quotas are called goals, generally don't pass constitutional scrutiny any more. But the fact is that the city doesn't want to give up its quotas. According to Niles, the long-term goal is to increase minority representation to 55 percent, the same as the city's work force. There wouldn't be anything wrong with that, or anything remarkable either, if the city's policies were not discriminatory and that's just how things turned out. But the city's policies, carefully spelled out in the 1981 amendments to the consent decree, achieve the 50 percent minority by regulating the number of whites who are permitted to apply. ``The problem is minorities don't pass at the same rate,'' Niles said. ``If we took everyone in, we would have way more Caucasians.'' Niles isn't exactly right about that, either. It's not the pass rate that's so different, according to Mike Biagi, senior personnel analyst. It's the show-up rate. At every stage of the selection process, a larger proportion of Caucasians who are still eligible appear for testing. So to make it come out even in the end, fewer Caucasians are allowed to start, and within that group, it's first-come, first- served. That's in the consent decree, and it meant that last month from 5,000 to 10,000 white applicants were excluded from the test. Because the department was subject to a hiring freeze for three years, it hadn't offered a written test for new applicants since 1990. There were 13,000 notification cards on file from minorities. Biagi did a statistical analysis of the last five examinations, and based on how many minority and white candidates made it through to the final ranking from which new hires are chosen, offered 5,000 white candidates the opportunity to take the test. That's 18,000 altogether, of whom about 4,500 actually turned up Saturday for testing, but what fraction of those are minority and white won't be known until the tests are scored, in two or three months. Half of those who took the test will pass it and appear for the next stage, the physical exam, and half, again, will pass that, Biagi said. Then the final 1,000 or so will have interviews and background checks, and from those approximately 200 will be offered jobs during the next two years, based on their rankings from the interviews. The decree says explicitly that the initial screening is the only point in the selection process where race and ethnicity may be considered. But Niles interprets the decree to mean the city must still chose minorities for half of the places in recruit classes, on average. Department officials are looking into the possibility of scheduling more tests, but since the thousands of people who wanted to take the test and couldn't are all white, there will be a considerable problem meeting those 20-year-old racial goals. Isn't it about time to admit that handing out jobs by race is not a practical or a moral policy, and ask the courts for permission to bring it to a merciful end?