CA1: Police chief loses in non-Puerto Rican discrimination suit

Wilson v. Moreau, No. 06-2630.  This is a big, messy fight between a librarian and a police chief.  It really is about political discrimination, but since it doesn’t take place in Puerto Rico,I think it is strange.  The librarian threw the book at the police chief.  The police chief loses.  If you care about our future, you will read on.

Moreau became mayor, running on a platform of “if elected, he would fire [the police chief] Wilson.”  The librarian then acted like a complete jerk to the police chief, giving him crappy cars, and suspending him for not undertaking an investigation of the library. The mayor and some detectives, then “raided” the library to see if library resources were used to support the police chief, by looking into peoples computers.  The people whose computers were searched, and the police chief sued.

The court holds that a police chief doesn’t get to claim political discrimination because he is a policy-maker.  Especially in a small town.  But there are a lot of generalizations there that people in this area need to look at, and consider changing the status of their police chiefs, depending on whether you like them or not.  (In my experience, small town police chiefs shape their role the way they see fit, and some of them are very good at making their position more “technical” than “political” as a means of mending fences with others and keeping their job.  Other police chiefs don’t seem to be able to that.)  See Elrod v. Burns, 427 U.S. 347, 360 (1976).

Secondly, hostile statements were not constructive discharge. 

There was no defamation because there was no showing of injury. Likewise, the plaintiffs didn’t show how poking through a library computer violated their (state) statutory rights to privacy.