BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) - The city of Bismarck is asking a judge to throw out a gender discrimination lawsuit filed by a fired female police officer, defending the department’s practice of using “war room” gatherings by supervisors to rank the performance of officers and determine their eligibility for pay bonuses and promotions.
Robyn Krile had achieved the rank of sergeant and was striving for lieutenant when she was fired in March 2017 after a county prosecutor deemed her not to be a credible witness in court. Krile last year lost a case before the state Department of Labor and Human Rights, but that doesn’t prohibit her from pursuing her claims in federal court. She sued in January , seeking damages for pain and suffering, lost pay and other reasons.
Krile alleges the “male-dominated department” tried to “kill” her career with various tactics including giving her the department’s lowest score in the “war room” - what she refers to as “an unrecorded, unstandardized, unprofessional group of adult men.”
Attorney Randall Bakke, who represents the city and now-retired Police Chief Dan Donlin, in a recent court filing says Krile earned any low scores through “serious misconduct and policy violations.”
Krile was reprimanded in 2016 for allegedly lying to another officer and for disparaging the officer, who is Hispanic. However, the state Peace Officer Standards and Training Board in 2017 dismissed a misconduct case against her, and she kept her peace officer’s license. She was hired by the Lincoln Police Department in suburban Bismarck late last year.
Bakke also included in his filing an affidavit in which Donlin asserts the “war room” process he implemented after becoming chief in 2013 was aimed at making performance evaluations “more fair and equitable” in part by involving more people and more input.
“All ’war room’ scores awarded to Krile were the result of a fair and impartial process,” Bakke said.
Women make up about one-fifth of the Bismarck police force, on par with the national average, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. It currently has no women in supervisory or management roles. However, the department’s recent history includes the first woman to serve as police chief in a major North Dakota city, when Debbie Ness was hired in 1997 and held the job for a decade.
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