Background
Plaintiffs Don Gordon and Terrell Jones, two Black officers on a Maryland State Police drug task force, alleged they were excluded from informal meetings and text chains where overtime and desirable assignments were circulated to white members. The harassment allegedly peaked in June two thousand and twenty when a supervisor circulated a racially coded and sexually explicit image of George Floyd. The plaintiffs sued the sergeant and other supervisors, alleging a hostile work environment under Section One Thousand Nine Hundred Eighty-One enforced through Section One Thousand Nine Hundred Eighty-Three. The district court dismissed race discrimination claims but allowed the hostile work environment claims to proceed and denied qualified immunity to the sergeant.
The court’s reasoning
The court applied a two-step qualified immunity inquiry, first addressing whether the complaint plausibly alleged a violation of clearly established law. The court found that the plaintiffs’ allegations satisfied the elements of a hostile work environment claim under Section One Thousand Nine Hundred Eighty-One, including that the conduct was unwelcome, based on race, and sufficiently severe or pervasive. The court held that the sergeant’s participation in exclusionary practices and his failure to discipline a subordinate for circulating a dehumanizing image of George Floyd constituted tacit authorization of a racially hostile environment. The court further concluded that existing precedent, including Campbell v. Galloway and Boyer-Liberto v. Fontainebleau Corp., provided fair warning that such conduct by a supervisor in a law enforcement setting violates clearly established law.
We find that Plaintiffs have plausibly alleged Sergeant Heath’s participation in and tacit authorization of a racially hostile work environment, and that the right at issue was indeed clearly established at the time.
What it means going forward
The ruling clarifies that supervisors in law enforcement agencies may be personally liable for failing to correct racially offensive conduct and for participating in exclusionary practices that create a hostile work environment, even without direct racial slurs in every instance.