Opinion ID: 4522706
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: The City of Orlando

Text: Plaintiffs also sue the City, claiming that because the City failed to properly train its police officers, the City is liable for any constitutional violations arising from its officers’ failure to protect them from Mateen’s attack. 6 Yet, as the Supreme Court long ago held, a municipality cannot be vicariously liable for the actions of its employees. City of Canton v. Harris, 489 U.S. 378, 385 (1989) (“Respondeat superior or vicarious liability will not attach under § 1983.” (citing Monell v. Dep’t of Soc. Servs. of City of New York, 436 U.S. 658 (1978)). Instead, 6 As noted in the earlier discussion, Plaintiffs have failed to plausibly allege that the officers’ failure to choose the most effective means of protecting them constituted a violation of their substantive due process rights. As any claim against the City for its failure to train necessarily derives from a constitutional violation by its employees that adequate training might otherwise have prevented, this conclusion could end any discussion of the City’s liability. Nonetheless, we proceed with the analysis, assuming the possibility that the police officers violated Plaintiffs’ substantive due process rights. 19 Case: 18-15162 Date Filed: 04/06/2020 Page: 20 of 27 “a municipality can be found liable under § 1983 only where the municipality itself causes the constitutional violation at issue.” Id. (emphasis in original). Thus, “[p]laintiffs who seek to impose liability on local governments under § 1983 must prove that ‘action pursuant to official municipal policy’ caused their injury.” Connick v. Thompson, 563 U.S. 51, 60–61 (2011) (quoting Monell, 436 U.S. at 691). Here, Plaintiffs allege that the City’s failure to properly train its officers was a legal cause of Mateen’s shooting of many patrons at the Pulse nightclub. “In limited circumstances, a local government’s decision not to train certain employees about their legal duty to avoid violating citizens’ rights may rise to the level of an official government policy for purposes of § 1983.” Id. at 61. Yet, “the inadequacy of police training may serve as the basis for § 1983 liability only where the failure to train amounts to deliberate indifference to the rights of persons with whom the police come into contact.” Canton, 489 U.S. at 388. Only then can a failure to train be fairly characterized as an actionable “policy or custom.” Id. at 389. Establishing “deliberate indifference” requires “proof that a municipal actor disregarded a known or obvious consequence of his action.” Connick, 563 U.S. at 61 (quotation marks omitted). Because “decisionmakers can hardly be said to have deliberately chosen a training program that will cause violations of constitutional 20 Case: 18-15162 Date Filed: 04/06/2020 Page: 21 of 27 rights” unless they have “notice that a course of training is deficient in a particular respect,” a “pattern of similar constitutional violations by untrained employees is ordinarily necessary to demonstrate deliberate indifference for purposes of failure to train.” Id. at 62 (quotation marks omitted). Here, Plaintiffs never suggest that a pattern of prior similar constitutional violations put the City on notice of its need to train officers. Instead, in faulting the City for failing to provide training that would have reduced the loss of life during Mateen’s shooting spree, Plaintiffs proceed only under Canton’s “single incident” theory of liability. That is, Plaintiffs acknowledge that nothing like this had ever occurred before in Orlando. 7 Although noting that ordinarily a pattern of similar constitution violations by untrained employees will be a prerequisite for a failure-to-train claim, the Supreme Court in Connick reasserted the possibility that “single-incident” liability could attach to a municipality “in a narrow range of circumstances” where there was an “obvious need for specific legal training,” regardless of the absence of prior similar incidents. Id. at 63–64 (quotation marks omitted). And in the earlier Canton decision, the Court had hypothesized that there may be situations where “the need for more or different training is so obvious,” given a specific officer’s duties, “and the inadequacy [of the training is] so likely to 7 Indeed, according to Defendants, “[a]t the time, the massacre at Pulse was the deadliest mass shooting in American history.” 21 Case: 18-15162 Date Filed: 04/06/2020 Page: 22 of 27 result in the violation of constitutional rights, that the policymakers of the city can reasonably be said to have been deliberately indifferent to the need.” Canton, 489 U.S. at 390. As its example, the Court hypothesized that if a city armed its officers knowing “to a moral certainty” that officers would use their firearms to arrest fleeing felons, the need “to train officers in the constitutional limitations on the use of deadly force” would be “so obvious” that failure to do so would reflect deliberate indifference to constitutional rights, even without notice of prior constitutional violations. Id. at 390 n.10. The district court concluded that Plaintiffs “did not plausibly allege that the City of Orlando’s failure to train officers on security in public places that are highly susceptible to danger, and how to enter and neutralize an active shooter, fits within the narrow range” of circumstances giving rise to Canton’s hypothetical liability for a municipality based on a single incident. The court explained that Plaintiffs had failed to plausibly allege “that nightclubs are at such great risk of attack that a municipality’s failure to train its police officers on how to respond and even ‘neutralize an active shooter’ amounts to deliberate indifference. The incredibly specific training envisioned by Plaintiffs on responding to and neutralizing a hypothetical active shooter without violating anyone’s constitutional rights bears no resemblance to the use-of-deadly-force training envisioned in 22 Case: 18-15162 Date Filed: 04/06/2020 Page: 23 of 27 Canton.” The court further observed that neither the Supreme Court nor this Court has ever applied the single-incident liability exception. We agree with the district court that Plaintiffs do not allege the type of factual scenario hypothesized by Canton: a situation in which the risk of a constitutional violation is “so obvious” that failing to provide specific legal training amounts to deliberate indifference to constitutional rights. Canton, 489 U.S. at 390. The gist of Plaintiffs’ conclusory and skeletal allegations is (1) that Officer Gruler violated their constitutional rights when, instead of immediately entering the club to engage in a shoot-out with Mateen, he decided to wait for reinforcements, and (2) that the other officers who subsequently arrived violated Plaintiffs’ rights by waiting three hours to take out the shooter. Defendants note that Plaintiffs’ complaint omits relevant details about the shooting “documented in numerous investigatory reports and in the national media coverage,” including the fact that the situation “rapidly developed from an active shooting into a hostage standoff with a barricaded gunman proclaiming affiliation with an international terrorist organization and threatening to detonate explosives.” Obviously, in a motion-to-dismiss context, we cannot accept as true Defendants’ assertion, but must instead accept Plaintiffs’ non-conclusory allegations. That said, Plaintiffs’ complaint touches on some of the uncertainty involved in the situation, alleging that after the shooting began and other officers arrived, some of those officers 23 Case: 18-15162 Date Filed: 04/06/2020 Page: 24 of 27 “entered the club and engaged the shooter temporarily,” but that “[d]uring this brief engagement, Shooter retreated further into Pulse, holding a number of patrons hostage in the Pulse restroom. Finally, approximately three (3) hours later . . . the police finally made their entry and neutralized Shooter.”8 Yet, Plaintiffs never provide any specifics as to what they contend would have been constitutionally adequate training for such an unprecedented event with so many uncertain factors, or why the need for that very specific training would have been obvious to the City. Instead, they simply throw out the conclusory allegation that the City failed to “adequately” train its officers in how to “respond[] to active shooting situations.” For sure, one hopes that police departments will be trained in the best practices for responding to shooting incidents, mass and otherwise. But to allege that a City’s particular training program is so constitutionally deficient as to make the police officers and their superiors legally responsible for the acts of a mass murderer, a plaintiff must do a lot better than Plaintiffs do here with their skimpy, conclusory allegations. See Twombly, 550 U.S. at 555 (noting that a complaint “does not need detailed factual allegations” but must contain “more than labels and conclusions, and a formulaic recitation of 8 Notably, these allegations undermine an inference that officers were entirely unprepared to respond to an active-shooter threat, as Plaintiffs alleges that “police finally made their entry and neutralized [the] Shooter.” Likewise, in acknowledging that some officers had earlier entered the club in an effort to engage Mateen, but that these officers had to retreat because Mateen was holed up in a restroom with hostages, Plaintiffs contradict their own suggestion that the police were twiddling their thumbs while Mateen continued to shoot patrons in the club. 24 Case: 18-15162 Date Filed: 04/06/2020 Page: 25 of 27 the elements of a cause of action”); Iqbal, 556 U.S. at 679 (noting that legal conclusions “are not entitled to the assumption of truth” and “must be supported by factual allegations”). Even if we assumed that the need for additional training was obvious, Plaintiffs’ pleadings do not plausibly allege that the City’s failure to train caused the alleged constitutional violations. Connick, 563 U.S. at 60–61. This is so because Plaintiffs’ conclusory allegations include no factual assertion that proper training would have required officers to immediately enter the nightclub rather than to take some other prudent course of action. Thus, even taking the factual allegations in the light most favorable to Plaintiffs, the complaint does not plausibly show that, but for a lack of training, officers would have entered the nightclub sooner.9 In sum, Plaintiffs’ second amended complaint did not plausibly plead that the City was deliberately indifferent to victims’ constitutional rights. Accordingly, we affirm the district court’s dismissal of Count IV.10 9 In conclusory fashion, Plaintiffs also assert on appeal that, as to the John Doe defendants, there was an “obvious” need for “basic training” to “avoid situations, as described in the pleadings, where victims are treated as criminal suspects: detained, arrested, and personal property seized without any lawful basis whatsoever.” Setting aside the fact that Plaintiffs’ complaint does not allege an absence of “basic training,” Plaintiffs have made no effort to describe the training necessary to avoid the alleged constitutional violations, much less why the need for such training was “obvious.” 10 On appeal, Plaintiffs do not appear to challenge the district court’s dismissal of Counts I–III against the City of Orlando. In any event, the district court’s ruling was correct. The second amended complaint names the City as a defendant in each count, but Counts I–III focus 25 Case: 18-15162 Date Filed: 04/06/2020 Page: 26 of 27