Padilla et al v. City Of Chicago et al

Filing 443

MEMORANDUM Opinion and Order Signed by the Honorable Milton I. Shadur on 8/18/2011:Mailed notice(srn, )

IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF ILLINOIS
EASTERN DIVISION
NOEL PADILLA, et al.,
Plaintiffs,
v.
CITY OF CHICAGO, et al.,
Defendants.

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No.

06 C 5462

MEMORANDUM OPINION AND ORDER
Noel, Socorro and Lourdes Padilla, together with Irene
Santiago and Erling Johnson, have invoked 42 U.S.C. §1983
(“Section 1983”) to sue the City of Chicago (“City”) and certain
of its police officers (“Defendant Officers”) assigned to the
Special Operations Section (“SOS”).

Plaintiffs assert that

Defendant Officers violated their constitutional rights and that
City caused that violation by failing to train, supervise and
discipline police officers and to track reports of officer
misconduct throughout the Chicago Police Department
(“Department”).

For discovery purposes the case was referred to

Magistrate Judge Arlander Keys, who denied plaintiffs’ motion to
reconsider an earlier order that had refused to compel City to
produce certain documents relating to its allegedly “broken
disciplinary and supervisory systems.”
Plaintiffs have again sought reconsideration of that ruling,
this time under Fed. R. Civ. P. (“Rule”) 72(a), which permits
this Court to modify or set aside the ruling to the extent that

it is clearly erroneous or contrary to law.

For the reasons

stated in this memorandum opinion and order, plaintiffs’ motion
is granted in part and denied in part.
Municipal Liability Under Section 1983
Under Monell v. Dep’t of Soc. Servs., 436 U.S. 658, 694
(1978) a plaintiff seeking to hold a municipality responsible for
a Section 1983 violation must do so on a showing of direct rather
than vicarious liability.

Where as here plaintiffs claim “that

the municipality has not directly inflicted an injury, but
nonetheless has caused an employee to do so, rigorous standards
of culpability and causation must be applied to ensure that the
municipality is not held liable solely for the actions of its
employee” (Board of County Comm’rs of Bryan County, Okla. v.
Brown, 520 U.S. 397, 405 (1997)).
For that purpose Monell and its almost innumerable progeny
have prescribed and applied a few alternative routes for reaching
that goal.

In this instance plaintiffs’ chosen path is well

described by the plurality opinion in City of St. Louis v.
Praprotnik, 485 U.S. 112, 127 (1988)(internal quotation marks
omitted), under which they must establish that City’s alleged
failure to train and discipline its police officers and track
misconduct reports constitutes “a widespread practice that,
although not authorized by written law or express municipal
policy , is so permanent and well settled as to constitute a

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custom and usage with the force of law.”
In addition, plaintiffs must demonstrate that City condoned
the asserted practice by acting with deliberate or reckless
indifference toward complaints of misconduct (Wilson v. City of
Chicago, 6 F.3d 1233, 1240 (7th Cir. 1993)).

Merely showing that

City responded slowly, ineffectively or even carelessly is not
enough (id.).

Moreover, “the existence or possibility of other

better policies which might have been used does not necessarily
mean that the defendant was being deliberately indifferent”
(Frake v. City of Chicago, 210 F.3d 779, 782 (7th Cir. 2000)).
To demonstrate that City had the ability to identify and
track officers accused of repeatedly violating citizens’
constitutional rights but failed to address those abuses
adequately, plaintiffs seek what they describe as “summary data”
regarding complaints of police misconduct on a Department-wide
basis (P. Mem. 2).

At issue here are plaintiffs’ Fourth Set of

Requests for Production (“Requests”) Nos. 7-16, 18-24, 26 and 35
(P. Mem. 6, 17, 18).1

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Peculiarly, plaintiffs also characterize Requests 28-31
as “discovery in dispute” despite City’s production of nearly
2,000 pages of documents in response to those Requests (P. Mem.
Ex. C at 16-17). Because plaintiffs offer no explanation as to
why that production is insufficient or as to how the Magistrate
Judge’s judgment as to Requests 28-31 could be considered clearly
erroneous, this Court of course upholds Judge Keys’ ruling on
those items. And although plaintiffs had also moved for
reconsideration of Judge Keys’ refusal to compel answers to
plaintiffs’ Third Set of Interrogatories Nos. 1 and 3-23, their
counsel now admit that those Interrogatories seek the same
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Specifically, for the 2000 to 2005 period plaintiffs seek
(1) the complaint and assignment histories of every City police
officer (Nos. 7-9, 11), (2) disciplinary outcomes for every
officer who either accrued more than 10 complaints (Nos. 13-16)
or was assigned to SOS in 2004 or 2005 (No. 10), (3) breakdowns
as to all officers by number of complaints received, assignment
units and referral to “Early Warning” programs (Nos. 12, 20, 21)
and (4) breakdowns of complaints by type, assignment unit of the
officer and final outcome (Nos. 18-19, 22-24).

Plaintiffs also

seek a list of City’s assignment units in 2004 and 2005 (No. 26)
and detailed information regarding every complaint received by
three specific nonparty officers throughout their careers
(No. 35).
Judge Keys held that while discovery pertaining to Defendant
Officers and other SOS officers is appropriate, plaintiffs cannot
justify taking discovery on every City police officer and every
report of alleged misconduct of any kind across the Department
during a five-year period.

Plaintiffs argue that ruling is

“clearly erroneous” for two reasons:
1.

Department-wide summary data is relevant and

necessary to plaintiffs’ Section 1983 claim against City.
2.

Judge Keys denied not only Department-wide

information as the Requests at issue and consequently ask that
City respond to one or the other (P. Mem. 6). Hence this opinion
addresses only the Requests enumerated in the text.
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discovery requests but also those limited solely to SOS.
Plaintiffs’ first point as to the potential utility of--and
therefore the need for--the Department-wide discovery is well
taken.

Whether Defendant Officers and their SOS coworkers

accrued disproportionately high numbers of civilian complaints
but were rarely disciplined in comparison to the rest of
Department is clearly relevant to the possible validity of
plaintiffs’ claim that City was indifferent to the presence of,
and the need to deal with, rogue officers.2

Without Department-

wide data plaintiffs would be unable to demonstrate (if such is
the case) that the pattern of complaints as to SOS generally and
among Defendant Officers specifically stood out from the
situation as to the remainder of the police force.
Any more limited comparison as between Defendant Officers
and their SOS coworkers would be insufficient, because (according
to Defendant Officer Herrera’s own admissions) misconduct was
officially encouraged by SOS “bosses,” which suggests it was
widespread throughout the assignment unit (P. Mem. 5).
Department-wide statistics are necessary to determine whether the
SOS unit as a whole routinely received high numbers of
complaints, yet had (or also had) low rates of discipline.

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It is important to recognize that other evidence now
available, such as admissions of misconduct by some SOS members
(even including guilty pleas to criminal charges), validates the
use of SOS figures as a baseline.
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It should be remembered that this opinion deals only with
the discoverability of possible evidence, not with what the
discovered facts will or will not turn out to prove.

It need not

be assumed that the data gathered will be admissible--the
question of admissibility is not before this Court.

As Rule

26(b)(1) confirms, the data does not have to be admissible to be
a proper subject of discovery.
City’s response that it had the ability to track and
identify officers who received high numbers of complaints, and
that it did in fact identify a pattern of misconduct within SOS,
misses the mark.

As an initial matter, none of the complaint

files produced to plaintiffs contain any pattern analysis,
although Department policy requires that any pattern analysis
must be included in complaint files (P. Mem. 7).

More

importantly, even if such pattern analysis took place (which
plaintiffs hotly contest), the discovery that plaintiffs seek is
nonetheless needed to determine whether City’s practice was to
ignore available evidence of misconduct.
City correctly asserts that plaintiffs cannot simply throw
out statistics to suggest the existence of a policy or custom
(Monell, 436 U.S. at 694).

That, however, is not the point.

If

for example the statistics could be viewed by the factfinder as
demonstrating that a low rate of findings of misconduct as to SOS
officers (who, as already indicated, have been found to have

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engaged in blatantly improper and illegal activity) is also
reflected as to complaints against officers generally, that could
well be the basis for a factfinders’ decision that City turned a
blind eye to the misconduct--and could thus constitute a
predicate for Monell liability.
This line of analysis does not, as City would have it,
create the prospect that a single set of statistical data could
justify Monell liability in every case against a City police
officer--a clear contravention of the Supreme Court’s admonition
that “rigorous standards of culpability and causation” apply to
questions of municipal liability under Section 1983 (Bryan
County, 520 U.S. at 405).

But City fails to cite any authority

(and to this Court’s knowledge none exists) that prohibits
reliance on statistics in conjunction with other evidence.

To

the contrary, City’s claimed authority (Bryant v. Whalen, 759
F.Supp. 410, 423-24 (N.D. Ill. 1991))--quite apart from its
nonprecedential status--merely states that statistics standing
alone are not enough.

Here plaintiffs point to a plethora of

additional facts that could provide support for a finding of
City’s deliberate indifference to misconduct (including
admissions from various Defendant Officers), such that plaintiffs
should not be precluded from statistical discovery based on the
insufficiency of statistics alone.
As to plaintiffs’ second point regarding Judge Keys’ denial

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of discovery requests pertaining solely to SOS, once again
plaintiffs are correct.

Even though Judge Keys acknowledged that

discovery pertaining to Defendant Officers and SOS is “entirely
appropriate,” he denied plaintiffs’ motion in its entirety.
Because Request No. 10 relates solely to SOS, it should have been
enforced.
Conclusion
Judge Keys was called on to deal with a massive and complex
assemblage of documents and with conflicting submissions by the
litigants.

It is perhaps understandable that defense counsel,

whose submissions did not give plaintiffs’ arguments their full
due, led the able Magistrate Judge down the path reflected in his
report.

But as the foregoing discussion reflects, this Court has

found defendants’ perspective skewed, and it has traveled a
different path.
Consequently this Court finds clearly erroneous, and it sets
aside, Judge Keys’ order that plaintiffs are not entitled to
Department-wide discovery.

City is ordered to respond promptly

to Requests 7-16, 18-24, 26 and 35 except to the extent that
specific components of any such Requests necessitate an
individualized examination of the complaint files themselves.3

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without seeking to define that limited exception, but
solely by way of an example, if part of the information sought in
a single Request is located in one database while another portion
is located in another database, that would not justify
defendants’ withholding of any disclosure. Instead the
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Given the number of officers and complaints at issue, such a oneby-one examination would be unduly burdensome.

________________________________________
Milton I. Shadur
Senior United States District Judge
Date:

August 18, 2011

responsive information in each database would have to be produced
so that plaintiffs could try their hand at any desired assembly
of the data.
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