Opinion ID: 204093
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: HRD's Role in the Promotion of City Police Officers

Text: Under the civil service law, appointing authorities have considerable latitude over the process by which police officers are selected for promotion to sergeant. Most importantly, municipalities are not required to use examinations prepared and administered by HRD to assess local candidates for promotion to police sergeant. [5] Cities and towns have long been able to opt out of the HRD-administered process and implement their own promotional examinations pursuant to an agreement with HRD. See Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 31, § 5( l ) (statutory authority for HRD to delegate administrative functions) and §§ 9-11 (setting out the general parameters for promotional examinations). Under this option, municipalities assume the administrative functions that HRD might otherwise perform. Municipalities are still bound by the state civil service law and regulations requiring adherence to basic principles of merit. But municipalities have flexibility in deciding how to satisfy these regulatory requirements. [6] Cities have used this authority to develop and administer their own police promotional examinations or to rely on the HRD-administered examination in combination with other metrics. For instance, the cities of Leominster and Salem used a combination of the HRD examination and a simulated job scenario to evaluate promotion candidates in 2007. And in 2002, Boston developed and administered its own written examination. This decentralized process reflects the future direction of the civil service administrative system. As of September 1, 2009, cities and towns no longer have the option of relying upon HRD to develop and administer hiring and promotions examinations for police sergeant or any other civil service positions, due to Massachusetts' budgetary constraints. Instead, municipalities have begun developing and administering their own processes. See Letter from Paul D. Dietl, Chief Human Res. Officer, HRD, to Mun. Appointing Auths., Human Res. Divs., Fire Chiefs, and Police Chiefs (Aug. 7, 2009), available at http:// www.mass.gov/Eoaf/docs/hrd/cs/ information/cs_aug_7_2009.doc. Cities and towns must, of course, create processes that comport with state civil service laws. And state law still provides oversight over the process: people aggrieved by municipalities' appointment or promotion decisions can directly appeal to the Civil Service Commission. But HRD's role in the promotions process under this system is limited to providing technical assistance when asked. Id. Until these recent changes, cities and towns could alternately make their police promotion decisions by relying in part upon the results of a competitive annual examination administered by HRD. For 2005, 2006, and 2007, the years at issue in this suit, all the city defendants and the MBTA chose this option to evaluate candidates for promotion to police sergeant. Municipalities that chose to use the HRD examinations nevertheless retained flexibility over key aspects of promotions, including the ultimate choice among candidates. They could also consider factors beyond performance on the HRD examination. By law, municipal police promotions must be made on the basis of competitive examinations, whether on the basis of the HRD examination or some other test. Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 31, §§ 59, 65. HRD is given statutory authority to establish the form and content of these examinations. Id. § 16. However, HRD's discretion in this area is bounded. By statute, all examinations must fairly test the knowledge, skills and abilities which can be practically and reliably measured and which are actually required to perform the job, a requirement that may significantly limit both the form and the substance of an examination. Id. And HRD must consult with labor representatives and professionals in the field to determine what skills and abilities are relevant for promotion to police sergeant or any other position. Id. For decades, HRD and its predecessor agency developed annual written examinations to evaluate candidates for police sergeant promotions. State civil service law and a consent decree to which HRD's predecessor agency was a party shaped the content and form of these examinations. That consent decree, entered in 1980, arose from civil rights litigation involving the Boston police department, but, in general terms, HRD's predecessor agreed to develop and administer promotional examinations that complied with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's (EEOC) Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures (1978), 29 C.F.R. § 1607.1-18. See Boston Police Superior Officers Fed'n v. City of Boston, 147 F.3d 13, 15, 17-18 (1st Cir.1998) (describing the terms of the consent decree as it applied to HRD's predecessor). The Guidelines required, inter alia, maintaining records that show the impact that examinations have on applicants according to race, sex, or ethnic group, see 29 C.F.R. § 1607.4(A), and complying with stringent standards to verify that the substance and form of the examinations are significantly related to job performance, id. § 1607.5. Nothing in the civil service law, however, mandated that municipalities had to use the results of HRD's written examinations as the only criterion to evaluate merit. Section 3(e) states that promotional appointments must generally be made on the basis of merit as determined by examination, performance evaluation, seniority of service or any combination of factors which fairly test the applicant's ability to perform the duties of the position as determined by the administrator. Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 31, § 3(e). Section 6B further provides that HRD and collective bargaining representatives must jointly determine the weight that appointing authorities should give to performance evaluations as another basis for evaluating candidates. Id. § 6B. In any event, subject to these constraints, the police promotional examinations HRD developed in 2005, 2006, and 2007 consisted of one hundred multiple-choice questions derived from law enforcement textbooks. The highest possible score on the test was 100, and 70 was the minimum passing score. After developing the examinations, HRD was required by law to prepare a notice of the examination for promotion to police sergeant. Id. § 19. Massachusetts civil service law also limited the possible pool of promotional candidates to only those officers who had served on the force for at least three years in most cities. Id. § 59. After administering these examinations, HRD was required under the civil service law to create and maintain eligible lists of candidates for possible promotion to police sergeant, broken down by police department. Id. § 25 (generally discussing eligible lists). While eligible lists ordinarily ranked promotion candidates in order of their written examination scores, id., the law also imposed a number of preferences that significantly affected candidates' rankings. Various categories of veterans, for instance, are given an absolute preference over other candidates, and candidates meeting that description are listed in order of examination performance before any other candidates, even if other candidates received higher scores. Id. § 26. By virtue of these mandatory preferences, the top scorers on the HRD written examinations were not inevitably the candidates listed at the top of the eligibility list. By law, an eligibility list produced in a given year also usually expired after two years, and such lists were available for public inspection. Id. § 25. Municipalities only saw these eligibility lists if they determined that they had a vacancy for police sergeant and decided to fill it through promotion by using the results of the HRD examination. Promotion was not a police department's only option for filling such a vacancy; by law, police departments could also request a transfer from another department, subject to HRD's verification that the request was made for good reason and would not impose undue hardship on the transfer candidate. Id. § 35. Assuming that a local police department had opted to use the HRD examination process and wanted to promote officers to fill an open position for police sergeant, the department would notify HRD of the number of vacancies in the department through a requisition. Id. § 7. Pursuant to § 27, HRD would then certify from the relevant eligible list the names of the three candidates at the top of the list who confirmed that they were willing to accept the job. Id.; id. § 27. If a candidate did not so confirm, that name was removed, altering the rankings. Id. § 25. HRD, under its rulemaking authority, also promulgated PAR.09 in its Personnel Administration Rules, a rule to clarify the number of names to be certified based on the number of vacancies a local police department identified. Human Res. Div., Personnel Administration Rules PAR.09 (2003). PAR.09, commonly referred to as the 2n + 1 rule, states that to fill a certain number of vacancies, a municipality can choose from a number of candidates from the ranked list equal to twice the number of vacancies plus one. Id. The rule extrapolates from the statutory requirement that HRD certify three candidates for a single vacancy. If there are two vacancies, the municipality must choose among the top five candidates, and so on. Id. Even at this point, however, municipalities did not have to automatically promote the candidate at the top of the eligibility list. That is so for several different reasons. Nothing in [the civil service law], the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has observed, mandates that promotions be made in strict rank order based only on examination results. Brackett, 850 N.E.2d at 553. First, the civil service law allowed the police department to bypass the candidate at the top of the list, so long as the department, as the appointing authority, then provided HRD with a written statement of reasons. Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 31, § 27. Municipalities could bypass the top-ranked candidate on an eligibility list for many reasons, including a history of domestic violence, past criminal charges, or any other grounds pertaining to the candidate's ability to effectively perform in the job. See Crete, 418 F.3d at 59. HRD could review a municipality's explanation for a bypass only on extremely narrow grounds. Its review merely ascertained that the municipality's reasons were not based upon political considerations, favoritism, or bias, and HRD could not second-guess a municipality's judgment. Id. at 59 & n.9. The bypassed candidate could then obtain a hearing before the Civil Service Commission to challenge the municipality's statement of reasons. Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 31, § 27. Importantly, [w]hile Massachusetts law requires an explanation for promotions made outside of strict rank order, there is no prohibition on such out-of-rank decisions. Cotter, 323 F.3d 160, 171-72. Second, at least in limited circumstances, even if HRD objected to a proposed bypass, municipalities could choose to promote more than the estimated number of open positions for police sergeant, thereby avoiding the bypass process entirely. See, e.g., id. at 164-65 (noting that in 1997, the City of Boston decided to promote thirty-six sergeants instead of the initial thirty it had intended after determining that the initial ranked list of candidates included only one African-American in the top thirty scorers). Boston's race-conscious decisionmaking in Cotter was ultimately upheld under the Equal Protection Clause as a permissible race-based distinction that was justified by a compelling and narrowly tailored government interest. Id. at 168-71. Third, municipalities that wished to hire more minority candidates could do so pursuant to another HRD administrative rule, PAR.10. Human Res. Div., Personnel Administration Rules PAR.10. That rule allows police departments to make requisitions to fill positions included in their affirmative action plans so long as HRD substantiates that the department engaged in previous discrimination that was either unconstitutional or in violation of state or federal law. Id. HRD would then provide the police department with a separate, ranked list of candidates beyond the initial 2n + 1 rule who met the identified minority criteria and were otherwise eligible for the promotion. Id. The number of candidates on that separate list would also be determined by the 2n + 1 rule. Id. The Commission has upheld this rule as a valid exercise of HRD's rulemaking authority, and Massachusetts' highest court recognized it as a permissible means by which municipalities could consider race as a factor in promotion decisions. See Mass. Ass'n of Minority Law Enforcement Officers v. Abban, 434 Mass. 256, 748 N.E.2d 455, 461-62, 469 n. 12 (2001). In short, even for police departments that chose to rely upon HRD-administered written examinations to evaluate candidates for promotion to police sergeant, these examinations were never wholly determinative of promotion decisions. These departments had a number of ways they could consider other factors beyond examination scores and look beyond the top-ranked candidates on an eligibility list. And while the state imposed some limitations on municipalities' options, these were overwhelmingly the product of statutory requirements in the civil service law, not of HRD's administrative decisions. Municipalities must continue to comply with these requirements even when HRD plays virtually no role in the promotions process. In other aspects of police employment, HRD also played a limited role. HRD developed, administered, scored, and distributed the results of hiring examinations just as it did in the promotions process. Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 31, §§ 5(e), 6. HRD also exercised authority to establish minimum standards and qualifications for police hires, including health and physical fitness standards. Id. § 61A. Finally, the parties have stipulated to a number of important facts concerning HRD's role relative to the cities and the MBTA in other aspects of plaintiffs' employment. By law, HRD does not hire or pay police officers; the cities and MBTA do. HRD has no daily control over police officers' work activities, nor does it provide plaintiffs with any financial benefits. HRD is not responsible for police training, transfer decisions, work assignments or schedules, supervision, discipline, termination decisions, fringe benefits, ERISA benefits, or workers' compensation insurance.