Claims against the Police Chief for the alleged violation of 42 U.S.C. § 1985 and under the state created danger theory were dismissed with prejudice.
The plaintiffs, the administrators of an estate, sued the Borough of Folcroft, its Police Chief and a police officer for the deaths of the decedents as a result of a high-speed police chase. The complaint alleged violations of 42 U.S.C. § 1983 against the Borough and Police Chief and of 42 U.S.C. § 1985 against the Police Chief, along with supplemental state law claims for negligence, including those under the Pennsylvania Wrongful Death and Survival statutes. The plaintiffs’ claims under 42 U.S.C. § 1985 were dismissed as they failed to allege any racial or class-based discriminatory animus motivating the actions of the Police Chief. The plaintiffs merely averred that the Police Chief violated § 1985 by consorting and conspiring with “other Folcroft Borough Officers.” In addition, the plaintiffs’ claims under the theory of a state-created danger were also dismissed as nothing the Police Chief did qualified as a “fairly direct” cause of the harm to the decedents. He was not present during and did not direct the chase and knew nothing about it as it took place. Further, the decedents were not foreseeable victims of anything he did or members of any discrete class of persons subject to potential harm. They were merely “member[s] of the public in general.” The claims for Monell liability, failure to train and negligence survived defendants’ motion for summary judgment.
Case Law Alert, 1st Quarter 2014