Alexander v. Chicago Park Dist.

• Decision Date: 03 June 1983
• Docket Number: No. 82-2783,82-2783
• Citation: 709 F.2d 463
• Parties: Silas ALEXANDER, et al., Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. CHICAGO PARK DISTRICT, et al., Defendants-Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

Page 463

709 F.2d 463

Silas ALEXANDER, et al., Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. CHICAGO PARK DISTRICT, et al., Defendants-Appellees.

No. 82-2783.

United States Court of Appeals Seventh Circuit.

Argued April 20, 1983.

Decided June 3, 1983.

Rufus Cook, Law Office of Rufus Cook, Ltd., Chicago, Ill., for plaintiffs-appellants.

Jack J. Carriglio, Foran, Wiss & Schultz, Chicago, Ill., for defendants-appellees.

Before BAUER, NICHOLS, ^* and WOOD, Circuit Judges.

HARLINGTON WOOD, Jr., Circuit Judge.

This is an appeal from the district court's denial of a preliminary injunction in a Fourteenth Amendment and 42 U.S.C. Sec. 1983 "equal services" class action alleging that the Chicago Park District discriminatorily administers parks in black and latino neighborhoods which are inferior in condition and maintenance as compared to those parks situated in predominantly white neighborhoods. In their motion for a preliminary injunction, plaintiffs sought to restrain the Chicago Park District from adopting any budget, plan or scheme which fails to allocate funds to parks without regard to the race or ethnicity of their clientele, fails to indicate the breakdown of funds on a per-park basis, or fails to allocate funds for the immediate repair of unsafe facilities in certain of the parks; the motion also generally sought to restrain the expenditure of park funds in a discriminatory fashion. Emphasizing the weakness of the plaintiffs' evidence of discrimination and the balance of equities, the district court determined that the prerequisites for preliminary equitable relief had not been demonstrated and so denied the motion. A full trial on the merits of the complaint is scheduled to commence almost simultaneously with the issuance of this opinion. Especially in view of this imminent opportunity to argue the full merits of this case, and in view of the complicated, non-self-executing nature of the relief sought, we affirm.

I.

The centerpiece of plaintiffs' evidence at hearings on the motion was a comparative survey study of fifty-seven Chicago parks, executed over a period of several days by four individuals with no background in park administration or evaluation. The study purported to demonstrate, largely through undefined and subjective criteria, inter alia, that sixty-eight percent of the parks in white neighborhoods were "very clean" while only five percent of black and latino parks could be so described; that sixty-two percent of the parks in white neighborhoods were "very well kept," while only ten percent of black and latino parks were so maintained; that seventy-five percent of the white parks were in "good" condition compared with only fifteen percent of the black and latino parks; and that only black and latino parks were "hazardous," "poor" or "unacceptable." In addition to this survey, there was also submitted photographic evidence and depositions of two newspaper reporters attesting to racially disparate park conditions observed in their simultaneous investigations. Plaintiffs and defendants also called expert witnesses in survey evaluation to respectively defend and attack the survey's methodology and integrity.

The district court found that the evidence offered by the plaintiffs was not sufficient to establish a reasonable likelihood of success on the merits of their discrimination claim. The district court particularly focussed on the lack of methodological rigor and sophistication in the conduct of the survey, the evidence chiefly relied upon by the plaintiffs. It concluded that numerous deficits combined to undermine the survey's credibility.

First, the district court noted, the evidence concerning the survey's timing, administration and staffing did not suggest either professionalism or minimal rigor. The director and author of the survey, for example, was a political scientist located in Washington, D.C. who had no experience in the evaluation of parks or park facilities, and no acquaintance with the Chicago Park District. Even more troublesome to the district court was the fact that the survey director was never present to control or even monitor survey administration, and instead communicated through a law student who was nominally in his employ but who operated out of the offices of plaintiffs' attorney. The director played no part in the hiring or training of the four surveyors, nor did he participate in post-inspection consultations and review, thus depriving him of a means to ensure that the conduct of the survey hewed to his design. Staff selection and training, the district court found, was also not such as to inspire confidence in the survey's reliability. The four surveyors were hired after brief interviews with the director's Chicago proxy (in at least one case, directly following the interview); two of the surveyors were demonstrably without any experience in the evaluation of park services, and there is no indication that the others possessed such training. Nevertheless, after two and a half hours of oral instruction, within two days the surveyors began their inventory in teams of two, during and around the Labor Day weekend in 1981, an exceptionally busy period for the public parks. Only one visit was allocated to each park, with no follow-up visits to test whether observed conditions were representative over time, and even these visits were concluded rapidly, in some cases at the rate of six per day. The hasty and cursory nature of the visits and the survey design, the district court noted, also calls into question the validity of specific evaluations. To take but two examples, the surveyors took no note of the recreational programs taking place in the parks, and, although the survey elicited descriptions of the availability of park lighting, all visits were made by daylight, thus preventing the surveyors from determining whether the erected lighting was functional.

Second, the district court noted, the lack of experience and training of the surveyors was exacerbated by shoddy survey design and tabulation. Most egregiously, the evidence established that the standards for site evaluation were neither precisely defined nor applied consistently throughout the course of the survey. Although the survey form contained evaluation checklists concerning cleanliness ("very clean," "clean," "in need of cleaning," and "unacceptable") and maintenance ("very well kept," "satisfactorily kept," "in need of care," and "unacceptable"), no definitions were furnished for these terms. Not surprisingly, the testimony established that the surveyors' standards of evaluation changed significantly over time, and that as a result of consultation with other surveyors, at least two survey answers were modified after the fact to reflect a shift in relativistic perspective. The elasticity of the evaluation categories is further suggested by the response of one surveyor who labelled at least one park as "excellent" even though he had noted broken water pipes, graffiti, broken glass, blocked lights, poor blacktopping and poor sidewalks. Further fluctuation in standards was virtually guaranteed by the fact that, although each park was surveyed in teams of two, only one evaluation checklist was provided for each park, making it quite possible that the relative persuasiveness of the two surveyors, rather than consistent direct observation, helped shape the final result. The district court found this fluidity and lack of objective indicia for evaluation especially troublesome in view of the bias inherent in the sharing of results among surveyors and the testimony of at least one surveyor that he had inferred the racial designations of some parks in advance of his survey and had allowed general neighborhood features to influence his park ratings. Finally, the district court found, whatever integrity these evaluations may have had was further eroded by the survey director's telescoping of the four-point evaluation spectrum into two-column data (e.g. the collapsing of "very clean," "clean," "in need of cleaning," and "unacceptable" into the categories "very clean" and "less than very clean"). And not only were the park evaluation criteria of questionable value, the district court found, but also the validity of the survey's classification of each park's racial character was open to question. For example, the category of "white" parks included only those located in neighborhoods of whose residents more than ninety-nine percent were white, while a park was denominated "black" if located in a neighborhood of whose residents eighty percent were black. Also inconsistently, a sixty percent threshold was used to designate the "black" parks in connection with some of plaintiff's deposition testimony. Further, there was a lack of rigorous correspondence between the park's character and the neighborhood's character; at least one park designated as "white" was found to have been frequented by an equal number of hispanic, black, oriental and white people.

Most of these criticisms of the survey's design and execution were supported at the hearing by one of defendants' expert witnesses, an academic specialist in urban resources who had published several articles concerning the distribution of park resources and had made a detailed study of the allocation of Chicago Park District resources. To buttress the survey's credibility, plaintiffs called as an expert witness an academic survey specialist who was retained by the plaintiffs the day before his testimony and had spent less than three hours reviewing the hundreds of pages of handwritten documents and the survey report and questionnaire.

Aside from the survey, other evidence of the discriminatory allocation of resources among Chicago parks was before the district court and, like the survey, was found to be of questionable value. Plaintiffs, for example, submitted numerous photographs purporting to depict disrepair and heaps of detritus in certain parks, but many of the sites...