Brookline Officer Takes Appeal To Civil Service Commission

BROOKLINE, MA — A Brookline police officer who filed a discrimination complaint against the Brookline Police department claiming she is being unfairly treated after she was suspended twice in less than a year took her appeal to the Civil Service Commission in Boston Thursday.

Officer Amy Hall who has been on the Brookline Police Department since 2001, and before that worked at the Brookline Recreation Department, previously appealed a five-day suspension last month. She lost, and took her appeal to the Civil Service Commission.

Hall and her attorney Mike Mason brought six witnesses to the hearing. The attornies for the Police department, Wendy Chu and Mike Downey had five.

Hall, who said she had never been in trouble in the department before this, was disciplined in April for failing to follow a direct order and not cooperating in a department investigation. The union got involved, and Hall agreed to a 15-day suspension at the time as part of a settlement.

In May, she filed a complaint with the Massachusetts Commission on Discrimination in relation to the first suspension.

Then, in August, she said she found a flyer in her mailbox at work with some areas highlighted that made her feel harassed. She took it to her supervisors. She said they agreed to start an internal investigation. She said once the investigation was complete, she made it a daily habit to ask for a copy of the report.

On Sept. 5, she asked for permission to come into the station while she was on her beat. She planned to check her email for news about the report and to ask supervisors for a copy of it. The town described this as personal business, but Hall argues because it involved the internal investigation at work about harassment it was not. While she was at the station, dispatch radioed her, asking her to meet with a resident who had come into the station and was at the front desk to make a suspicious incident report before she left the station.

Hall acknowledged the call. She had just finished talking to a superior about getting a copy of the investigation, and he'd advised she email the person in charge of records for the report, which she was on her way to do, she said.

Some 30 minutes later, the resident who came in to make the report left. The person at the front desk did not alert dispatch that the woman was about to leave, nor did Hall get another call asking her about it. The department says she should have prioritized the resident or at the very least told dispatch it might take a while. The officer said she stopped by the desk on her way out of the station, just as the dispatcher had requested and that if it had been urgent the dispatcher would have directed differently.

Hall said when she did report to the front desk she asked the officer at the front desk for more details, so she could follow up with the woman. He told her it wouldn't be necessary.

It wasn't until a week after that Hall was called in to be questioned about what happened and asked to write a report on it, which is something she said she has not seen happen to her male counterparts in two recent incidents. The department argues that's because in both of those cases the officers did not respond at all because of equipment malfunction.

The attorney for the department said previously Hall "failed to perform her job duties" and that she was engaging in personal business on work time, and made "several untruthful statements" in an official report.

Hall's attorney argued that was overreaching.

He said Hall's mistake was saying she was on an assignment from a superior when really she was just acting on his instructions.

"It's just profoundly unfair," her attorney said during a hearing on it last month.

Hall has three children and is the provider for the family as her husband, a former Brookline officer, was disabled on the job.