Court Opinion

ID: 9478547
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 06:51:53.562902+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:46:29.389948
License: Public Domain

COFFIN, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
I register this dissent in an effort to prevent, in other cases if not this one, a slippage from the vigorous constraints of summary judgment review. The majority, I fear, has not heeded the stern command to indulge all reasonable inferences from facts in favor of the party opposing summary judgment.
In this case a summary judgment has an unusual hurdle to clear, in that the Commonwealth has to establish that the facts permit no reasonable person to conclude that the registry examiners are not primarily engaged in investigating, apprehending, or detaining criminal suspects. These very specific requirements in both nature and degree of “law enforcement” activity set this case apart from a case such as Mahoney v. Trabucco, 738 F.2d 35 (1st Cir.1984), where all personnel in a paramilitary organization are treated as fungible insofar as the application of the bona fide occupational qualification exception to the ADEA is concerned.1
The court’s opinion does an excellent job of showing that examiners in some degree do many things that police do, but which do not involve the investigation, apprehension, or detention of criminal suspects. These include such duties as attending police training school, carrying firearms, investigating accidents, helping out in emergencies and large gatherings, and providing escort to custodians of large amounts of money. As for investigating, apprehending, and detaining criminal suspects, the record is both meager and ambiguous. The fact that a successful candidate for an examiner’s position may bid for assignment to special units such as “Auto Theft,” “Drunk Driving Roadblocks,” “Investigative,” and “Warrants Apprehension” suggests that the work done by the bulk of examiners in branch offices does not primarily involve the prerequisite duties.
The apprehension of violators of motor vehicles laws does appear to fall within the “law enforcement” definition, but there is no indication of the primacy of this function; to the contrary, the one statistic available tells us that over a seven-month period the 117 examiners in branch offices made 254 arrests — or an average of 2.2 arrests a month for each examiner. Certainly this fact does not bar a conclusion that apprehending suspects was not a primary activity-
*940So also as to the fact that the Deputy Registrar of Motor Vehicles averred that 120 new (nonenforcement) clerk examiners were needed to release “all of our law enforcement people to go back out on the street.” One can of course argue that “all” refers to the 306 employees that the Deputy Registrar characterized as being in law enforcement. This would indicate that roughly a third of the duties of present personnel are administrative and presumably two-thirds are “law enforcement.” But it is equally reasonable, in context, to draw an opposite conclusion. One of the Deputy Registrar’s statements was “As we put clerk examiners into the branch offices ..., we are freeing up the law enforcement people to go back out on the highway.” One may infer from this that the people freed-up are to be the 117 examiners in the branch offices. On this reasoning, one can conclude that if it takes 120 civilian clerk examiners to free up 117 branch examiners (and perhaps some investigators), branch examiners currently are doing very little law enforcement work.
I therefore think that a genuine issue of material fact exists and that summary judgment was improper.

. At first blush, it may seem a plain reading of the ADEA's definition of "law enforcement officer” would reintroduce the issue facing us in Mahoney, whether to treat police officers in administrative posts differently from those in the field. But the statute answers this concern. The definition of "law enforcement officer” under the 1986 amendment includes "an employee engaged in [the investigation, apprehension, or detention of individuals suspected or convicted of criminal offenses] who is transferred to a supervisory or administrative position." 29 U.S.C.A. § 630(k) (Supp.1988).