Opinion ID: 512413
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Discipline for Miscellaneous Violations

Text: 92 Jones' proofs on the pattern and practice issue also included evidence of Departmental discipline in four areas of minor violations. Those four areas include (1) hard surface violations, (2) arrest-related discipline, (3) mistaken transmissions, and (4) falsifying medical consultations. A hard surface violation occurs when a firefighter takes fire equipment off of a hard surface road. Employees who are arrested or charged with criminal activity must immediately notify the Department. If the charge is a felony, the employee is customarily suspended without pay until the charges are disposed of in court. A mistaken transmission occurs when one of the Department's communications operators transmits the incorrect address or other information to the engine house. Finally, absences from work must be medically verified. 93 Here, as in Moore, the evidence demonstrates by an overwhelming preponderance that the major violation for which Jones was demoted, fighting, was enforced consistent with the standards set forth in the Department's Manual, i.e., according to the severity of the underlying violations and the participants' personnel histories. Yet those criteria, as in Moore, were virtually ignored by the district court. 94 Moore, a black police sergeant, was demoted to patrolman after being cited to the Civil Service Commission by the police chief and being found by the Commission to be guilty of three major violations: influencing a government official in a matter relating to purely personal advantage, conduct unbecoming an officer, and interference with the proceedings of a trial. Moore's prima facie case was based entirely on an attempt to show that he had been treated less favorably than white officers who had committed similar forms of misconduct. The Moore court noted that the violations for which Moore was disciplined had been consistently enforced, but that the 95 consistency escaped notice below because the district court in its findings of fact attempted comparisons that ranged widely through the police department code of conduct, reaching ad hoc judgment about the reprehensibility of Moore's violations relative to other officers' use of profanity, abuse of alcohol, and absence from work without leave. These conclusions acknowledge no deference to the police department classification of violations, no application of the Solem v. Helm [463 U.S. 277, 103 S.Ct. 3001, 77 L.Ed.2d 637 (1983) ] criteria for comparing offenses and, in short, no basis whatsoever for the asserted correspondence of conduct. Without attempting to establish a single process of comparison for the vast variety of disciplinary situations, we may safely say that in this case a principled determination of comparable seriousness required at least initial deference to the system of offenses created by the police department, an administrative agency of the City of Charlotte. The departmental scheme may of course be disregarded if arbitrary or capricious. But in here judging similarity without the discipline of that initial guidance and without the application of the Solem criteria, the fact-finding process strayed into clear error. 96 Moore, 754 F.2d at 1108-09 (footnotes omitted). 9 97 Similarly, the court below gave no deference to the Fire Department's classification of violations as major or relatively minor. Nor did it note the fact that minor violations are typically enforced by many different officers working in fifty different engine houses on different shifts, whereas the discipline for major violations is typically imposed by a single officer, the Director of Fire Services. Finally, the court offered no principled basis for equating Jones' violation, an intentional violent act against a fellow firefighter, with other firefighters' negligent acts or intentional acts against property. See note 9, supra. In short, the district court's pattern and practice analysis is structurally flawed because it is based on an unprincipled conception of similarity and comparability of major and minor violations. See Moore, 754 F.2d at 1106. Accordingly, we are left with the ineluctable conclusion that Jones has failed to carry his ultimate burden of proving that similarly situated black firefighters were disparately disciplined for miscellaneous offenses of comparable seriousness because of their race. Segar, 738 F.2d at 1268 (quoting Burdine, 450 U.S. at 253, 101 S.Ct. at 1093).