Victory for Police Department’s Right to Fire

In the City of Hays, Kansas, an ex-employee known for union activism sued a police department for firing him. During his lawsuit, an existing employee provided an affidavit in support of the ex-employee. The police department then fired her too, and she subsequently filed her own lawsuit entitled. She insisted that she had a First Amendment right to submit an affidavit in court against the police department without being fired for it.

But in one of the first appellate decisions of the New Year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit ruled unanimously against her and dismissed her lawsuit. The court held that the police department, as a public employer, has a strong interest in avoiding disruption by employees. Public employers are allowed to fire employees if they might cause disruption to the internal operations of the employer, or to employment relationships. Even though public employees have some rights of free speech, those free speech rights are outweighed by the need of the public employer to avoid disruption.

In this case, although the employee’s signing of her affidavit was absolutely an exercise of her First Amendment rights, it caused enough potential disruption to justify her firing, the court ruled.

Police Chief Donald Scheibler testified that the employee disclosed confidential information in her affidavit, making it impossible for him to trust her. The court also wondered about the employee’s loyalty to her supervisors, or whether her real allegiance was to people outside of the police department. Based on this and other evidence, the court found that the employee’s signing of an affidavit had a detrimental impact on her working relationship with her supervisors, and thus they were justified in firing her.

Proof of actual disruption by an employee is not required, the court held. Instead, it found that the mere possibility that an employee’s speech might be disruptive – in this case, the signing of the affidavit – was enough to justify the public entity firing her. The police department wins a victory for keeping law and order, and avoiding disruption among its own employees.

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