A local judge has refused to rule directly in favor of 10 white police officers who claim the Chattanooga Police Department engages in reverse race discrimination.
Chancellor Howell People’s ruling, issued late Monday, means the case, which has survived in the court system for four years, could be decided by a jury in coming months, attorneys for the plaintiffs said.
“We will either appeal (Chancellor Peoples’) decision or take it to trial,” attorney Steve Dobson said Monday as he exited Hamilton County Chancery Court.
The hearing featured arguments from the plaintiffs who are hoping to use as leverage a 2009 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that had wide ramifications with regard to legal claims based on race.
Mr. Dobson and his colleague, Donna Mikel, said the Supreme Court case was “eerily similar” to the one they are litigating here. They assert supervisors froze promotions within the police department in 2005 based on the belief that the testing process used in 2003 to pinpoint candidates for promotion negatively affected minority officers.
The 10 plaintiffs listed in the lawsuit are current white police officers of varying rank who say the promotions freeze kept them from achieving higher positions in the department, even though their 2003 test results qualified them. They are seeking unspecified economic damages.
Mr. Dobson and Ms. Mikel had hoped to convince Chancellor Peoples to rule directly in favor of the local plaintiffs as the U.S. Supreme Court did in the case of several white firefighters from New Haven, Conn.
“There’s direct evidence that race was a factor,” Ms. Mikel argued with regard to the local case. “(Former Police Chief) Steve Parks admitted that the one promotion made after the freeze was made because the candidate was African-American.”
In the New Haven case, city officials rejected test results of white and Hispanic firefighters who qualified for promotions because no black candidates scored high enough.
The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ruled that there was no evidence that New Haven’s testing policy discriminated against blacks. The court said that the city’s “race-based action” was “impermissible” unless the city could have proven that someone would have had a legitimate discrimination claim against the city because of the test.
In his ruling, however, Chancellor Peoples noted that, in the local case, the testing process of the police department in 2003 has yet to be declared by an expert as “race-neutral,” even though several high-ranking employees already have testified that it was a fair process.
He ruled also that Chattanooga already had made several valid defenses in the case, including the fact that the police department had no obligation to promote the officers simply because they scored high enough in the testing process.
The ruling seemed to favor Chattanooga, which always has claimed that the promotions freeze in the police department came about because of several factors, including budgetary concerns and advice from city attorneys who said the testing process at least needed to be reviewed for “adverse impact” on minorities.
The city implemented a new testing process in fall 2005 after learning that the highest-ranking minority officer came in at No. 35 as a result of the 2003 testing process.