lady of six week water record that supports municipal liability in january two thousand and twelve the city of sweetwater was being run by gangsters and the policy in custom requirement established in more now was intended to prevent the imposition of municipal where no wrong could be ascribed to the municipal decision makers here it is clear that the actions that led to mr perez is injuries or sanctioned or at least overlooked by the city of sweet water can i ask you a question what level of specificity do we have to decide that there was customer policy because it's one thing it seems to me for you to say there was there was a sort of a prevailing custom of corruption but i mean don't we need to drill down a little bit deeper as we would say in a qualified immunity context to say is there some reason to ascribe liability specifically for the act that caused the harm here to the city two different things seems to me that i and i agree with you so i think that we've established what we need to prove is that there was a custom and that this custom was what caused the violation right and i think that we've established overwhelmingly that there was this culture of corruption due to this towing ordinance that was enacted where they get five hundred dollars straight to the city on top of whatever the toing was which was also related to the city that's a company i guess i'm just asking you to get from the corruption of the towing policy the alleged corruption of the towing policy to sort of willy nilly shooting at fleeing suspects causing them to crash into cars and kill other people or whatever so the corruption of the city there in the affidavit that was entered into evidence it outlines that they were using force and violence against  citizens in order to an actor in order to effectuate these tows that there was torture and others for forms of violence that were use and a causation i think torture to enforce the towing policy they were using the detectives were  you using torture really ramp it me and it was it doesn't necessarily tied to the towing policy but that's when policy is outlined and then it says during the years that the investigation your argument was that the towing policy and the practices were rounding it's big groups robust enforcement were what was the moving force behind this constitutional violation i thought that was your argument that's one of the causal connection that i think that i understood you to be focused on in my misunderstanding that's one of the theories of liability and i think we've set forth a couple of other theories i'd strain it but the failure to train and especially mr armando gonzalez which is the first shooter in this case i think it's important that he was hired on the force for the part time for the christmas holidays and eight december of two thousand and eleven this happened january second of two thousand and twelve we've got a fleeing suspect going back to his car in disregard of a police order mean those are disputed facts are not disputed facts and that is different from simply towing a car the reason and it's our position that the reason that this car was even stopped to begin with was to effectuate this to a policy well ok but let me been back up given those undisputed facts where is the ability to support an inference a reasonable jury to find that  a more seasoned officer with more robust training would have done anything different i mean you've got this fleeing suspect heading for a car and taking off at high speed it was a fleeing traffic  so it there and he they shot him twenty four times but then there's the whole suspicion of gang activity there's the fact that he does have outstanding warrants against him it's not it's a little bit more than that the police had no idea regarding the warrants or the gang activity when they started shooting at what he was fleeing for they have those reasons he was fleeing for those reasons but there was an be down to the police at the time and they shot him twenty four times the jury found that there was no  think if it's an object of not a subject in court well the objective with reasonably informed police officer would have known of that is that is that true and i don't i'm not saying it is i'm just asking i don't believe it is your honor i believe it's what's important is what they knew what the subject of the new at the time that they shot and there's no evidence to that a reasonably informed officer would have known about these warrants because it was outside of the their immediate jurisdiction so here's what i worry about a little bit and i'm not really sure maybe you can tell me why it is that the for the claims were structured this way the case goes forward on a municipal liability theory before you've still got some officer claims pending is that right they've been resolved ok but what i fear is that we are we are making an officer liability argument here in a ministerial liability context and those two things are very different so i mean you have to disjunction now the supreme court has kind of fleshed out policy for us a little bit but custom i think as it should be because it's sort of if the whole it's a pretty high bar and i think you know to judge rosenthal's questions you've got to you've got to knit that causal connection pretty tightly to show that the city itself not the officers but the city itself is properly ascribed to liability ok for the for the for the the specific harm at issue here ok so there's evidence that the detective bureau generally was was running amok which was the testimony of a of an employee of sweetwater at the time there's testimony that they were going unsupervised and that they were basically doing stopped outside of their jurisdiction and roughing up citizens for lack of a better but we don't have me tell me what the cause of connection even if we assume that there's sort of this jenner allies to approach of generally running amok tell me how that maps onto the specific facts of this case particularly those facts that are undisputed or we have initially please saying it was a very high speed initial motivation for the stop and the and no the passenger nor driver able to say to remember if the driver was in fact speeding if not racing so the because so it starts with the city of sweetwater having this custom the top policy and generally what's happening at the department of time coupled with them hiring then this armando gonzalez which the city of st part of themselves hired him did not give him a copy of the standard operating procedures did not review the standard operating procedures with him sen him out on the road with a firearm and this is precisely the case that was hypothesized in canton which i understand that only the fifth circuit has has actually found the case that's analogous to those facts but the in canton supreme court said that in a narrow range of be a violation to citizens federal constitutional rights so it's our position that the theories just on that basis alone weak there can be municipal liability attached then coupled with what was going on in the city at the time so the culture the corruption the violence that was happening the lack of a records department which it's our position that it was a purposefully that of a records department because they did not want anybody to find out what was going on there's no there's no records of training because there was no records between two thousand and ten and two thousand and twelve or an organization of the records that armando gonzalez had been working there for potentially a week before he was out on the road on his own with a firearm driving in his own car that the officers pulled that officer breo so called pulled over this car outside of history stick should did not follow protocol because they allowed that to happen called over sweetwater instead of following with them unit with the mutual aid agreement required which was to to that the miami dade police department the people with jurisdiction know conduct have three more police officers come out order the view of the occupants out of the vehicle talk to him about what are you doing driving this hundred thousand other car when the occupants are out of the vehicle they do an investigation for fifteen to eighteen minutes never once calling the supervisors or the people that actually had jurisdiction in the area and then once this happens they could have done it differently was there a violation of a constitutional right  was this the moving force behind given your theory or theories that once their their plan was thwarted then that's when they started shooting at him and they shot their plan for the towing ordinance the plan to tow the car that they know it all comes back to the towing ordinance that's part of it yes including the failure to train and the failure to train coupled with the the environment at the time so this this way they're handling themselves in this manner then they hire somebody into this chaos which is essentially what it was where the mayor was eventually indicted and these three or four police officers that are all there at the time were eventually indicted in their career in united for acts similar to what we have here acts related to the towing of the scene not none that have to do with fleeing your honor just admitting there is no prior incidents that have anything to do with leaving but there they were accused of roughing up citizens and at what point do you draw the line it's ok to hit them it's ok to torture them but it's not ok to shoot at them so our position is if you create that environment you create the the potential for your officers to then go a step further and then shoot at them and create the situation that happened with mr perez and i see that my time is almost up and i just want to address the issue that if your if your honour's about the post evidence actions that were not admitted admitted they were not exactly similar in that they didn't have anything to do with fleeing but it does show specific incidents regarding other officers at the time in the city of sweetwater that were torturing seven other incidents that were torturing they all happened in the year two thousand and twelve under the same administration so you saved your time for rebuttal thank you your honor  a court i think that there are really only a couple of thing a couple of points that i would like to make in the first addresses what was judge newsom's initial question about the level of specificity required of custom it seems to me that during this discussion and in the briefing as well there's a dead reckoning on what the issue should be before this court and that is was there sufficient evidence of a custom or policy of the city of sweet water that allowed the use of constant shocking deadly force because that's what the jury was asked that's what the verdict said the same is true of the question of conscience shocking high speed chases those were the two specific questions that were asked of the jury and then the judge the district judge judge alton aga ruled that there was not sufficient evidence to establish a customer policy we've heard a lot about a tow ordinance but that's not what we're here about and that's not what the theory was and that's not what the jury was asked to do i think that the a dead reckoning requires that we focus on the issue at hand and so and you know my brief is very specific about the failure of evidence in that regard i don't need to get into it in any any great amount of detail the only other point that i would like to make is we've heard training we don't hear a lot about it today but we've heard something about it and i think that a procedural matter is important here and that is that during the case in chief the plaintiffs and this is mentioned in my brief but i feel like i need to bring it up again in the plaintiff's didn't introduce any evidence of inadequate training whatsoever during their case in chief and of course we got up and we moved for judgment as a matter of law and a rule fifty the court denied that at the time and had us proceed with our case we then called all of our officers individually who we didn't represent weird we called each of them and they testified about their training and what they said was we're trained in accordance with f t l the standards training reserve and that's what that's what we do that was pretty much it in terms of the discussion of training there was no showing whatsoever even  cross examination of the inadequacies of any training at the city of sweet water and i think it's important to realize that that do that remains true even after the close of all the evidence and so i want to make that point otherwise i will refer you guys to the vineyard case that was decided in the circuit in one thousand nine hundred three and it's a similar custom failure to train cases this one and in that case there was no prior prior incidents and this court found that the because the way that the that the city handled the complaint that the department did not log complaints and that the queues officers were the ones that were assigned to handle the complaints and there was no policies and procedures manual that was sufficient to support a custom or policy argument to support municipal liability and we think that this case is not the case and in this case there's even more evidence than there was in vineyard regarding the the environment at the at the city at the time then in conjunction with what the what the city did after the fact after the shooting occurred the city then sent its own officers to to kind of sanitizer investigate the scene the city knew all the administrators in the city knew that that area was not their jurisdiction and they went over there to make sure it's reasonably infer that they went over to make sure that their officers would not get in trouble for this they never required their officers to comply with their own requirements in their own  in their policies manual asking them to write a written report of what what had happened and even years later armando gonzalez insists that he should not have to do that and shouldn't have to comply with those things because he was the shooting officer and the ceiling question pursuant to vineyard is whether that these this whole this environment as a whole in the city was the moving force behind the violation and i think it is clear that in this case what was happening in the city of sweet water is just as important as what happened that night because the only reason that it have that these actions of these officers happened that way is because of what they saw happening what they knew would be tolerated at the time and that and what was tolerated what was in fact tolerated and what we saw after that  was ok that to shoot at somebody down a street which is a very popular driven thoroughfare in miami dade county and you can shoot at somebody twenty four times as they're driving off and that's ok and there be no repercussions for it it's our position that on september twenty fifth two thousand and seventeen injury of ten people who all deliberated and all of them actually unanimously agreed that the city of st water was liable for the injuries sustained by mr pears this court must respect the decision of that jury where the evidence in the evidence presented is considered in the light and with all reasonable inferences in favor of mr pears as report as required by law the verdict clearly stands and under these facts the reversal is required for your honour's do not agree with that we ask that you have these reversed and remanded so that the other post event incidents can be included and presented to the jury so that there is more evidence for