Officers sue over vaccine mandate Six say city’s COVID-19 policy violates their rights

Six Los Angeles Police Department officers are demanding in a new lawsuit that a federal judge immediately overturn the city’s recently enacted COVID-19 vaccination mandate for employees.

In the suit filed Saturday in federal court in downtown Los Angeles, the employees allege the city’s mandate enacted in August violates their rights to privacy and due process.

The ordinance requires city employees to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 by early October. Employees may be granted exemptions for medical or religious reasons. The ordinance did not provide an option for employees to submit to weekly tests in lieu of getting vaccinated.

The six LAPD employees said in their lawsuit the city will not consider their claims that immunity from the virus in the form of antibodies left over from an infection is as effective as the jab.

Some of the employees in the

suit said they previously had contracted the coronavirus. As a result, the lawsuit claims, these plaintiffs say their “natural antibodies and immunity are greater than their vaccinated peers.”

“The city does not and cannot point to any evidence that vaccinated individuals have longer lasting or more complete immunity than those who have recovered from COVID,” they wrote in the complaint.

But studies have shown that the protection from natural antibodies generated during an infection can vary from person to person, leaving some vulnerable to being infected again.

Other studies have found that the amount of time that natural antibodies continue to provide protection also isn’t uniform.

The LAPD employees suing over the mandate are named in the lawsuit as Jason Burcham, Rodge Cayette, Michelle Lemons, Michael Puno, Susana Reynoso and Ana Fuentes.

Along with the city, the complaint names Mayor Eric Garcetti, LAPD Chief Michel Moore and City Administrative Officer Matthew Szabo as defendants.

In a statement Monday, City Attorney Mike Feuer called the lawsuit a “political statement.”

“It’s a lawsuit that I am confident we will win,’’ Feuer said. “The U.S. Supreme Court, and courts across the country, have upheld vaccination mandates by government, and they’ve done so because they said the greater good compels it. The greater good compels this right now. This lawsuit is much more political statement than it is sound legal argument.”

An LAPD spokeswoman said the department does not comment on pending litigation.

Labor groups are still bargaining with the city over the ordinance. And the city extended its deadline for filing for an exemption, previously this past Thursday, to this past Monday.

The plaintiffs argue that officers have been feeling increased pressure from commanders to get vaccinated. They alleged hundreds of officers submitted for medical exemptions in August, but that half of them were denied.

Studies of millions of people who have been vaccinated during the pandemic show that they are safe. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Pfizer’s vaccine shot in August.

In the lawsuit, the employees said a commander during a roll call said the city was willing to “let go of the roughly 3,000 officers not vaccinated.” Other commanders were alleged to have called unvaccinated officers “unfit” for duty.

For months, the LAPD has struggled to increase the vaccination rate among its officers, which lags behind the rate for the city of Los Angeles. Less than half of officers have been fully vaccinated as of September.

That’s despite 10 deaths among officers and civilian employees since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020. Family members of other officers have also gotten sick and died.

In a meeting in late August, an outside attorney for the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the largest union for rank-and-file officers in the LAPD, gave a presentation in which he said courts have “consistently upheld the right to mandate vaccines/testing when needed to protect public health,” according to a description of the meeting from a spokesman.

The LAPPL is pushing for a vaccination program that would include weekly tests as an option for employees, modeled after similar programs enacted by the California state government and federal agencies.