Public Interest Briefs

Los Angeles Police Department Ordered to Accelerate Hiring of Women and Minorities

For the first time in its history, the Los Angeles Police Department is under a court order requiring it to reverse decades of discrimination and to recruit and hire vastly more women and blacks for police officer positions. In January, the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco issued an injunction, pending appeal, requiring LAPD to recruit, process, and hire women and blacks selectively in order to meet goals of 25% and 21%, respectively, in new recruit classes entering the training academy.

The order for accelerated hiring came in the Center’s lawsuit, Blake v. City of Los Angeles, which charges LAPD with sex discrimination in the hiring and promoting of women police officers. (A companion suit charging the Department with discrimination against blacks has been filed by the U.S. Justice Department.) This hiring order is the last round in the six-year-old Center suit alleging that LAPD’s failure to hire women for police officer positions violated both the 14th Amendment to the Constitution and Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibit sex discrimination in employment.

The order requiring accelerated hiring of women and blacks comes on the heels of last May’s landmark decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Court held that the Departments’ total exclusion of women prior to 1973 was illegal and that the minimum height and physical agility requirements were “presumptively illegal” in the absence of adequate validation studies showing that these requirements affected job performance.

Last summer, notwithstanding that ruling, LAPD announced its intention to begin a massive hiring campaign using the same exclusionary minimum height and physical agility requirements. In order to ensure that he proposed hiring would include a fair share of qualified women and minorities, Center attorneys began a series of legal proceedings which culminated in the Ninth Circuit’s hiring order.

The Center first attempted to obtain a preliminary injunction in the District Court which would have allowed the hiring to proceed only if it guaranteed 25% of the new jobs to women. Federal Judge Jesse Curtis denied the Center’s request in mid-December, but the Center quickly responded. Within three hours after Judge Curits’ ruling, and only one day before LAPD hiring notices would have been mailed, Center attorneys appeared before Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Thomas Tang seeking a temporary restraining order to stop the mailing of notices. The Center argued that if the notices were mailed, even if Judge Curtis’ decision was ultimately overturned, no adequate relief would be possible. The process of recruiting and hiring for the new classes in 1980 would have been irreversibly set in motion, guaranteeing predominantly white male recruit classes.

Judge Tang granted the request to halt the hiring process until a three-judge emergency motions panel of the Ninth Circuit could hear the issue. In January, Center attorneys appeared before that panel which reviewed whether LAPD could proceed with its requested hiring. The panel agreed with the Center that LAPD could begin to hire new recruits: (1) only if all women and black candidates who had already applied and who met the height, agility, and other selective and priority basis sufficient numbers of women and blacks to ensure that each class be at least 25% female and 21% black.

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