Judge Rules City Should Be Lawsuit Defendant

A federal court judge has ruled there is enough evidence to include the city of Denver (Colo.) in a lawsuit alleging communications center officials failed to properly re-train a dispatcher after he mishandled a previous case. The lawsuit involves a call that led to the shooting death of a 24 year-old man in 2012. The judge has previously ruled the city was not legally liable in the incident, leaving dispatcher Juan J. Rodrguez and the only defendant in the case. In his original ruling in June 2013, U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael E. Hegarty said the plaintiffs had failed to show “deliberately indifferent training and supervision,” and had made no allegation of violating the victim’s constitutional rights. But in his ruling last week, Hegarty said new evidence showed that Rodriguez had previously mis-handled a 911 call in Feb. 2012, and that supervisors and the center director concluded Rodriguez had made several mistakes that put the caller in danger. Yet despite his lack of mistakes, he received only a 15 to 20-minute “verbal non-disciplinary coaching” session from a supervisor. Hegarty noted that the city had previously said Rodriguez had received a verbal reprimand, a more serious discipline. He wrote, “It is plausible that the City’s short counseling session was merely a routine coaching and did not sufficiently train Mr. Rodriguez in specific skills for handling 911 phone calls—in this instance, the ability to discern emergency situations.” He ruled the updated lawsuit complaint contains “sufficient plausible allegations to establish a constitutional violation,” and that it can continue with the city of Denver as one of the defendants. Download (pdf) the judge’s decision and the amended lawsuit here, and read more about the incident here.