The theme about the relationship between the public employees and the First Amendment to the United States Constitution is as old as the origin of these two concepts is.
According to David Hudson “more than 20 million Americans work for federal, state and local governments.” (Hudson, 1) which represents a substantial part of the American society whose work has a great impact over the normal functioning of all federal, state and local authorities. Along with their official duties they, as ordinary citizens, they have their constitutional rights which sometimes oppose each other.
The question whether the First Amendment denies the government the possibility to discharge or not promote public employees because of their speech had a negative answer even till 1952 when in Adler v. Board of Education the Supreme Court held that the petitioner had the constitutional right to say what he thought but he had not the constitutional right to work for the government. (Adler v. Board of education, 1952) Later in the case of Pickering v. Board of Education (1968) the Supreme Court changed its opinion and stated that the public employment could not be used as a barrier to the constitutional rights. In that case a teacher was discharged because he wrote a letter to a local newspaper criticizing the local Board of Education. With its decision the Court tried to find the balance between the interest of the government to support an efficient work place and the interest of the employee to be free in his/her expression. In other words, the public employees should not be disciplined for criticizing or complaining from some government’s actions.
There are some very important elements in the matter. First of all, we have to notice that the rights given by the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution relate to speeches made in public, not in private. The Supreme Court has excavated an exception for the public employees which expresses in the fact that the free speech rules, applied to the outside of the work place, have a very little relevance to the public employees. (Waters v. Churchill, (1994)
Examining the numerous cases based on the relationship between the public employees and their constitutional rights under the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution it can be concluded that these are delicate subjects that have no vivid border among them and therefore they need a well settled balance.
The Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment that took place in the period October 1972 – 1973 showed that the increase in conventional police control in market police cars that was of sizable cost did not result in the decrease of crimes or raised feeling of security among the citizenry. What actually happened? According to the decision of the Kansas city police department administration in October 1972 through the whole 1973 the conventional routine patrols were eliminated in five beats that were named “reactive”, i. g. the patrols appear only in case they were called by the residents, and in other five, named “proactive” the patrols were increases twice or three times than the normal schedule. In five beats the patrols remained as they were. The answers to the four questions that were set before the experiment whether the crimes would decrease and the citizens would notice the enhanced presence of the police in the indicated in the experiment areas and if their feelings of being secured would change along with the appreciation of the police actions showed that there was no impact by undertaking all that changes. The citizens did not noticed the increase presence of the police, the number of crimes did not decrease, the feeling of security that citizens experienced also did not change and the evaluation of the police actions by the citizens remained the same.
The results were evaluated by the Police Foundation with the technical help of other researchers and they showed that “resources ordinarily allocated to preventive patrol could safely be devoted to other, perhaps more productive, crime control strategies.” ( Kansas City Preventive Patrol Report, n. p.)
Works cited
Adler v. Board of Education of City of New York, 1952, 301 N.Y. 476, 95 N.E. 2d 806, Web March 12, 2016
Hudson, David, Balancing Act: Public Employees and Free Speech, 2002, First Amendment Center Publication, Vol. 2, No. 2, Print
Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment Report, Police Foundation, Web. March 12, 2016
Pickering v. Board of Education, 391 U.S. 563 (1968), [1], Web March 12, 2016
Waters v. Churchill, 511 U.S. 661 (1994), Web march 12, 2016
