Employers with the urge to listen in on workers’ phone calls, take heart: A city that maintained an automated system for recording workplace phone calls isn’t liable for violating its employees’ civil rights. 

Current and former employees of the Providence, RI, police and fire departments sued their employer for recording the calls. Their lawyers argued that the employees’ Fourth Amendment rights were violated when the department’s automated system recorded calls at the city’s public safety complex for about eight months back in 2002.

But the First Circuit federal court reversed a $1 million judgment when its judges decided the city officials were immune because at the time, public safety employees did not have a “clearly established” right NOT to have calls made at work recorded under either the Fourth Amendment or federal wiretap laws.

The court also let the city itself off the hook for the recordings.

The court explained that to “find municipal liability, we have required that the custom or practice ‘be so well-settled and widespread that the policymaking officials of the municipality can be said to have either actual or constructive knowledge of it yet did nothing to end it.’”

“The recordings in this case were neither so widespread nor so well-settled as to be a custom or practice. They occurred at a single building and for a period of eight months … nor did plaintiffs show the city’s policymaking officials had constructive knowledge of it and yet did nothing to end it.”

So, the judges decided, a little recording for a little while that not everybody in charge knew about? No problem.

Tags: court decision, phone calls, Providence, recording, RI