By Jennifer B. Lee, The New York Times
Less than a year after the New York Police Department settled a class-action racial discrimination lawsuit for $26.8 million, nine black and Latino police officers filed complaints with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission yesterday, saying they had been victims of workplace racial discrimination and retaliation.
The officers contend that within Transit District 4, which covers most of the transit system on the east side of Manhattan, minority transit officers were disproportionately threatened with arbitrary transfers, denied preferred work assignments like plainclothes duty, denied requests for overtime, given negative performance evaluations after years of getting positive annual reviews, subjected to excessive disciplinary action and assigned unfavorable postings during the Republican National Convention.
All nine of the officers work in the district, which has about 125 officers, of which about two-thirds are black or Latino.
The officers say that they filed the complaints with the commission after the Police Department failed to adequately investigate their allegations.
In response to the complaints, Paul J. Browne, a police spokesman, said, “While we don’t comment on specifics of pending cases, it is significant to note that equal opportunity employment complaints in the Police Department plummeted 5 percent this year and by 23 percent over the last two years.”
The complaints said the discrimination took place between October 2003 and last month, when Captain Ernest C. VanGlahn was their supervisor. In interviews, the officers said that Captain VanGlahn installed a “quota system” that pressured officers to write at least 10 summons and arrest one person per month. The complainants said disciplinary action was taken against minority officers who did not make their quota.
“We noticed that if you’re a white officer that works in our command, special arrangements were made so that you don’t get into trouble” for not making your quota, Jackie Robinson, one of the complainants, said in an interview.
Eight of the nine officers had previously filed prior complaints with federal E.E.O.C. in December 2003. All nine officers filed complaints about the captain with the Office of Equal Employment Opportunity in the Police Department. They said, however, their complaints had not been fully investigated, and that in some cases the complaints had been dismissed without the officers being interviewed.
“The police commissioner should be ashamed that all this has been allowed to go on after several complaints,” said Michael Ryan, one of the complainants.
In addition to Mr. Robinson and Mr. Ryan, the other complaints were filed by Emmanuel Bowser, Leon Guzman, Scott Harrison, Frederick Inman, Charles L. Panton, Jose Martinez, and Ronald Saintilus.
Advocacy groups said that the case was indicative of broader patterns of discrimination within the entire Police Department. “In spite of lawsuits, in spite of strong statements from election officials, there is still a pattern of African-American and Latino officers being held to a more stringent standard and being treated unfairly,” said Eric Adams, a police lieutenant who is co-founder of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, an organization of black police officers.
The $26.8 million settlement, announced last February, compensated for discrimination against police employees who made claims for actions that occurred before Dec. 31, 2003.