The DC Office of Human Rights is located at One Judiciary Square. A recent DC Council oversight hearing included testimony that the agency needs more lawyers in order to address a backlog of cases that has grown due at least in part to expanded responsibilities. (Photo by Chris Kain)

Amid leadership changes, Office of Human Rights struggles to reduce backlog given resource limitations

By Graham Vyse On Mar 4, 2020 Last updated Mar 4, 2020

A new leader took over the DC Office of Human Rights last month amid calls to increase the agency’s funding and reduce its long-standing backlog — an issue the office had begun to address.

Michelle Garcia started as interim director on Feb. 4 although she continues to simultaneously lead the District’s Office of Victim Services and Justice Grants. Outgoing Mónica Palacio’s last day was Feb. 3. She is now running to succeed independent at-large DC Council member David Grosso, who is not seeking reelection.

News of Palacio’s exit followed her testimony at a Jan. 22 hearing of the DC Council’s Committee on Government Operations, where the outgoing director — whose departure hadn’t yet been announced — acknowledged that the office needed additional attorneys. This was one of a series of concerns raised by legislators, lawyers and community activists at the hearing.

The Office of Human Rights is responsible for enforcing the DC Human Rights Act as well as a variety of other local and federal civil rights laws — all within its mission “to eradicate discrimination, increase equal opportunity and protect human rights” for residents and visitors. The agency provides a legal complaint and mediation process available to those who believe they’ve been discriminated against, but the director also has authority to “investigate practices and policies that may be discriminatory.”

But resource limitations hamper its ability to fulfill its broad mission, according to testimony at the council hearing.

Alexander Afnan, a student attorney working at Georgetown Law’s Civil Rights Clinic, described the Office of Human Rights as “under-resourced” and its staff as “undertrained.” These deficiencies create “a reluctance to take on new cases, and complaints that are drafted frequently misrepresent the facts and the law,” he added.

Emily Chong — an attorney at Neighborhood Legal Services Program, a nonprofit law firm that provides free legal information, representation and advice to low-income DC residents — agreed. Some of the agency’s staff members “have been mistaken about the law or about their duties,” she said. For example, she noted that some members of the office’s legal team cited incorrect sections of the Fair Criminal Record Screening for Housing Act in a recent case and “incorrectly applied the facts to the law.”

Another frequent criticism at the hearing was delays in processing. The office can take months or even years to resolve complaints, Afnan testified. “Such delays have the inevitable consequence of putting complainants in often precarious situations, where they are forced to stay in environments where they are already experiencing harmful discrimination,” he said.

Ward 4 DC Council member Brandon Todd, chair of the Government Operations Committee, said the District needs to “prioritize additional funding, because it sounds like one of the recurring themes is the time it takes to get folks through the process.” Much of the testimony also focused on the need for the office to accept attorney-drafted charges, a move Palacio said she supported. Last April, Todd’s committee recommended that the office “change its policy requiring an intake interview for a represented party” and instead “allow attorney-drafted charges to proceed directly to investigation and/or mediation.”

The agency saw its authorized staffing climb from 43 in fiscal year 2019 to 47 in fiscal year 2020 and its local budget jump from $5 million to $5.65 million over that same timeframe. The Office of the Chief Financial Officer says funding would need to grow to $5.78 million in the coming fiscal year just to keep up with rising costs.

During Palacio’s tenure, which began when former Mayor Vincent Gray appointed her acting director in 2013, the Office of Human Rights nearly doubled in size in terms of enforcement authority, personnel, budget and volume of work. “The bottom line is that the agency’s enforcement authority has grown at a faster pace than staffing,” Palacio told The DC Line. “Two of the biggest challenges have been recruiting highly qualified talent and reducing the agency’s backlog of cases,” she added.

Concerns over OHR staffing and budget needs also contributed to Ward 6 Council member Charles Allen’s decision in 2018 not to advance a bill that would have expanded the Human Rights Act to explicitly protect homeless people, according to supporters of the legislation who lobbied Allen’s staff at the time.

Referring to the backlog, Palacio said the office has been implementing a plan to reduce delays in case processing. She told the council the office was “restructuring its enforcement teams to remove bottlenecks” as well as hiring new supervisors and attorney advisers.

The January hearing underscored the need for a strengthened Office of Human Rights amid growth in hate crimes. The change in leadership came after 203 hate crimes were reported to the Metropolitan Police Department in 2019 — 60 related to sexual orientation, 46 related to race, and 27 related to gender identity/expression. That’s down slightly from a total of 205 in each of the two previous years, but still about double the number reported most years in the past decade.

In 2015, the office released the results of an extensive study that found that nearly half of District employers preferred a less qualified applicant who was not transgender over a more qualified transgender applicant. At-large Council member David Grosso said at the time that, in general, DC “still has a long way to go in achieving a more equal, discrimination-free and inclusive city for all of its residents.”

This article was co-published with Street Sense Media.