Former Austin Police Department first-year officer Ramon Perez undoubtedly made mistakes during his rookie year. Whether those were simply rookie errors, or instead proved him unfit for law enforcement, was the central question argued last week in the federal civil rights lawsuit filed by Perez. Also at issue was whether those mistakes were the sole reason Perez was asked, in April 2005, to resign or face termination – or simply a pretext to get rid of him.
On Dec. 18, a five-woman, two-man jury concluded that Perez’s forced resignation was not based on discrimination. Yet as is often the case, the legal decision did not answer all the questions about why – and more particularly how – the decision was made that Perez wasn’t fit to wear APD blues.
Perez, at 41, joined the APD’s 109th cadet class in December 2003; by the following summer he had graduated from the academy and was riding with a field training officer. At times his supervisors noted that he was slow to update his location by radio, and he was counseled for “officer safety” issues – exposing his “gun side” to a suspect or not moving quickly enough on a traffic stop to confine the stopped driver to his vehicle. But they also noted he was progressing; on the last monthly update before Perez was let go, his sergeant, Jesse Brown, wrote “no deficiencies noted.” Perez contends that his errors were no more serious than those made by other rookie officers. Indeed, among his cadet class was Amy Donovan, who was killed in late 2004 when fellow rookie Adrian Valdovino backed his patrol car into her while on a call and pinned her against a utility pole. Valdovino was briefly suspended, but remains with APD.
Perez claims his errors were magnified by two of his immediate supervisors, Brown and Lt. Daniel Zahara, as a pretext for firing him. The real issue, said Perez, was that they disapproved of his religiosity. Raised a Catholic, Perez says he had a “revelation” as a teenager and was “born again.” Part of his motivation for becoming a police officer, he testified last week, was to act on Christian principles in helping others. He became involved in planning APD’s celebrations for the annual National Day of Prayer; he contends Brown and Zahara opposed such activities and began to pick apart every mistake he made as a way to get rid of him. They faulted him for not having backup on a traffic stop requested by members of the APD’s Gang Suppression Unit – even though two gang detectives were already there – and faulted him for not following a direct order when he failed to use a Taser on a man during a domestic violence call in January 2005. Perez said he believed using the Taser would have violated APD’s use-of-force policy, which requires officers to use the least amount of force necessary to effect an arrest.
Whatever the motivation, there were enough incidents to prompt his supervisors to request a “termination board” of superior officers to review Perez’s performance and decide whether to recommend that he be given the opportunity to resign (meaning he would be able to keep his peace officer’s license) or be fired. In early April 2005, that’s what happened, Brown testified; it wasn’t personal but “based on a totality of the circumstances.”
While on first-year probationary status, officers are not protected by civil service laws, and the city can terminate for any reason – except an illegal, discriminatory one. But the tangible evidence that would have linked Perez’s termination directly to his religious beliefs was, at best, thin. Nevertheless, portions of the case are troubling – in particular, the role played by APD psychologist Carol Logan. In March 2005, Zahara suggested that Perez be required to meet with Logan. Perez said he was told the meeting was intended to help “facilitate” better communication between him and his supervisors. At the end of the roughly two-hour meeting, Perez said, Logan told him that things had gone well, but Perez didn’t know that the meeting was, in essence, a fit-for-duty evaluation. Perez never got to see Logan’s report on that meeting until more than a year and a half later and had to request it through open records, because the city declined to release it until the Attorney General’s Office ruled that the law required it. The report, reviewed by the termination board, focused largely on the officer’s religiosity. Logan wrote that Perez’s beliefs were so strong as to be an “impairment” that “puts him at risk if he were to continue in police work.”
Melba Vasquez, president-elect of the American Psychological Association, testified that Logan’s failure to tell Perez why he was being evaluated, and her subsequent failure to share her conclusions with him, amounted to professional misconduct. (Perez testified that he filed a complaint with the state’s psychologist licensing board but was told it could not take any action because Logan is a city employee and not a private practitioner.)
Perez’s attorneys based their case for religious discrimination largely on the conclusions distilled in Logan’s report. Perez was fired, they argued, not because he made egregious rookie mistakes but because his deeply religious nature caused personality conflicts with his supervisors, which ultimately prompted Brown and Zahara to turn to Logan to help them get rid of him. His “dream of being an APD officer was destroyed by religious prejudice,” attorney Lou McCreary told the jury.
In response, Assistant City Attorney Chris Edwards argued that Brown and Zahara did exactly what they were supposed to do: monitor the progress of the rookies under their command, keeping an eye out for those that don’t make the grade. “No matter what we did we were going to get sued,” Edwards said, insisting that to put Perez on the street would be to risk not only his own safety but also that of other officers and Austin residents – also a sure recipe for an eventual lawsuit. Or, the city could cut its losses and get rid of Perez – that decision, she said, was also destined to end in litigation. But, she stressed, the decision to let Perez go “had nothing to do with religion.” Ultimately, the jury apparently agreed.
This article appears in December 25 • 2009.