Blue on Blue

Monica Lisle

Monica Lisle, a long-serving Alexandria police captain, has charged the city’s police chief with denying her a promotion to assistant chief by stacking the deck against her in favor of Black candidates in order to “fill certain unannounced racial quotas.”

As Lisle wrote in an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint last year, according to The Washington Post, “I believe that Chief [Donald] Hayes believes that diversity is specific to African Americans,” Lisle wrote in a complaint to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) last year. “I am a member of at least three protected classes, as a gay, woman, over the … age of 40.”

“Had the process not been flawed like it was, she would have been promoted,” said Damon Minnix, president of the Alexandria chapter of the Southern States Police Benevolent Association, adding that police department morale has suffered as a result. At full complement, the Alexandria police are authorized to have 322 sworn staff. In March, according to The Patch, there were 70 vacancies.

Read in The Washington Post why Lisle believes the promotion process was manipulated.

“The Alexandria Police Department is one of the most progressive Police Departments in the country,” avers the departmental website. — JAB