Ferreting out and stopping workplace discrimination is no easy task.

The process is perhaps more fraught in municipal government, I would suggest, where things that would result in instant discipline in the business world are often overlooked or tolerated.

Let's face it, government bureaucracies are not as lean or efficient or as well run as most private enterprises, and that is also true in the way they handle discrimination complaints.

New London government, its officials and managers, for instance, are accused of a wide pattern of discrimination, from black employees in the Department of Public Works claiming they are offered overtime less often than their white co-workers, to a volunteer at the senior center who says officials refused to host an event for an Hispanic holiday the way they do for other ethnic occasions.

"'Go back to your people,'" the Hispanic woman filing a complaint says she was told at the center.

Since 2007, there have been 32 discrimination complaints filed against New London city government, not including those against the Board of Education, according to the state Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities.

It took me weeks of inquiries with the commission to get that statistic, and it would be hard to get comparable numbers for enough municipalities to make a meaningful comparison.

Also, I have been told it will be months before my Freedom of Information request to the commission for copies of the CHRO complaints against New London is fulfilled.

It is hard to know how serious they are and how they compare to other municipalities without seeing them.

I did review eight current CHRO cases pending against the city, cases which are being actively reviewed for resolution, after a reference to them appeared as an agenda item for an executive session of the City Council.

The city's risk manager, in providing copies, said even just a handful of complaints could cost the city hundreds of thousands of dollars, in part because of the high legal costs in defending the cases.

Some won't go anywhere, he said. The Hispanic woman filing the complaint against the senior center, for instance, is a volunteer and not an employee and has no standing with the commission, the risk manager said.

New London city managers, he said, have more recently been trying to bring the number of complaints under control, encouraging employees to come forward and try to resolve issues with managers before filing complaints.

From what I read in the pending complaints, that tactic is doomed to fail because it doesn't address some of the real discrimination by managers that seems to be going on.

Employees file these complaints in the face of what they believe to be intolerable conditions that they say are not changing.

In the Department of Public Works, three different black employees have filed complaints saying that they have been denied promotions, raises and overtime, while those perks have gone to white workers with less experience.

I have no way of determining the truth of all those complaints, but there is enough smoke to suggest a fire is raging there.

The city fire department, now headed by a black chief, is otherwise a white bastion of city government.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had to intervene in 2012 after newly elected Mayor Daryl Finizio fired the first black firefighter hired by the city in decades.

The only other minority in the department, other than the chief, is an Hispanic firefighter hired when the city was under court order to integrate the department.

That Hispanic firefighter has a pending CHRO complaint against the city, saying he is routinely harassed and subjected to ethnic slurs and disparaging comments about his race. He says a union leader once addressed him by making fun of his lips and speaking in a false Puerto Rican accent meant to be comical.

"There are men in the NLFD who are aware of weaknesses in the discrimination laws and are exploiting these weaknesses to continually isolate, target, humiliate and harass non-white firefighters," the Hispanic firefighter wrote in his complaint, saying he has suffered extreme psychological stress and anxiety from the hostile work environment.

"These 'mobbing' and 'bullying' techniques are scientifically proven to cause physical, physiological and psychological damage."

The most compelling complaint I read was from a police officer who was born in Russia and immigrated to the United States 15 years ago, earning a degree from the University of Connecticut and going into police work because he wanted to be of service to his adopted country.

The officer's complaint centers around a confrontation with a police lieutenant who refused to let him go home and get his medicine even though he had worked more than 18 straight hours, had not eaten, and was dehydrated and experiencing severe stomach distress. The lieutenant screamed at him and was about to physically assault him, he said, before some witnesses intervened.

His informal department complaint against the lieutenant eventually was dismissed by Chief Ackley, he says. The chief suspended him for three days for the incident in which he says he was not allowed to go home to get his medicine, despite excruciating pain, he said in the CHRO complaint.

He said he traces the hostility he has experienced from the lieutenant, chief and a police captain to his Jewish religion and thick accent.

"Through the years I have been working at this police department, (the captain) would constantly ask me what religion I was following, why I was Jewish and not Christian or Catholic ... were both my parents Jewish or not, whether I went to church or synagogue or simply why I was Jewish and why it was important to me."

I found the officer especially believable in his long, carefully written complaint. In watching his back, he says, he is more worried about the chief, captain and lieutenant than street criminals.

"I often remind myself that we live in the year 2013 and in the past this country fought numerous battles for human rights and equality. And as a result I frequently try to convince myself that maybe they are not torturing me because of my national origin, religious creed and ancestry and instead it is something else that motivates them to torment me. However, after what they put me through it is hard to convince myself of such a notion ..."

"I have thick skin and I try to stay resilient to most of the difficulties I encounter, but what they did to me goes beyond the measure of fairness — it was simply despicable."

These complaints appear to be the tip of a serious, treacherous iceberg that is being ignored by city management.

This is the opinion of David Collins.

d.collins@theday.com

Twitter: @DavidCollinsct