HARRISBURG -- The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania on July 17 answered an inquiry sent to it by a federal appeals court concerning part-time police officers and their rights.
The Supreme Court received the question from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, which asked if police officers of all borough police departments, no matter the size, are still entitled to civil service employment protections.
The Supreme Court determined, “The civil service protections embodied in the Borough Code and the Tenure Act are broadly in pari materia insofar as they are intended to govern all borough police forces.” It added that the law also applies no matter how large the police force is.
“More particularly, [the] ‘normal working hours’ criterion contained in the Borough Code should be employed to determine how many members a borough police force has for purposes of deciding whether the Tenure Act’s two-officer maximum or the Borough Code’s three-officer minimum is implicated,” the court ruled
Although it said that the Borough Code does affect all boroughs, its police service provisions only work for police forces that have a minimum of three officers. It added, “We conclude that the Borough Code’s ‘normal working hours’ litmus for assessing membership in a police force applies equally to membership in a police force under the Tenure Act.”
Chief Justice Thomas Saylor wrote the opinion. Justices Max Baer, Randal B. Todd, Christine Donohue, Kevin Dougherty, David N. Wecht and Sallie Mundy concurred.
The lawsuit landed in the Supreme Court after plaintiffs William DeForte and Evan Townsend sued the Borough of Worthington and related parties in a federal court, following their termination in November 2012. The plaintiffs were paid hourly rather than on a salary. They also didn’t receive benefits. They were two out of four part-time officers on the force for the borough.
The officers alleged the borough violated their rights in the Borough Code or the Tenure Act, which bars a dismissal without any explanation. The federal district court granted the borough summary judgment after ruling that because the plaintiffs were part-time officers, they didn’t spend their normal working hours as a police officer for the borough, meaning they were not covered under section 46195 of the Borough Code.
The officer’s appealed in the Third Circuit, which suggested that the definition of a “member” was not complete in the Borough Code and Tenure Act. The appellate court then referred the Supreme Court to iron out the case.