Hartford Police Dept. v. Commission on Human Rights & Opportunities

Syllabus

The defendant P filed a complaint with the named defendant, the Commis- sion on Human Rights and Opportunities, alleging that P's former employer, the plaintiff, the Hartford Police Department, had discrimi- nated against P on the basis of his ancestry. Upon graduating from the police academy, P, who is Vietnamese, began a probationary period of employment, which included a field training program and during which superior officers were required to complete daily observation reports evaluating his performance. P received a satisfactory rating upon com- pletion of the field training program and then continued to receive generally satisfactory daily evaluations from his superior officers, includ- ing K, who previously had been disciplined for making discriminatory and/or racist remarks to other individuals. Subsequently, on two separate occasions, K made certain remarks to P about his grammar and writing skills, criticizing P's accent, inquiring into P's ethnicity, nationality, edu- cational background, and whether the Hartford citizens with whom P interacted could understand him. When P indicated that he would file a grievance against K if he did not stop making such comments, K stated that P should ''watch what [he says] or [he] won't be around [for] long.'' K told other superior officers about his interactions with P and sent a memo to the commander of the police academy, calling P argumentative and confrontational. Thereafter, multiple officers began, for the first time, to label P as argumentative and confrontational in their daily observation reports. One officer wrote a memo noting that numerous daily observation reports were missing from P's file. In addition, days after K sent his memo to the commander, P was contacted about an incident that had occurred seven months earlier during field training, when P lost a piece of the hat to his uniform. When interviewed by the commander, P stated that, at the time he lost the hat piece, he had been ordered by his superi