Filing a Civil Rights Complaint

Answer:

There are different ways that a person can complain about their civil rights being violated. For example, if it’s an employment-related thing, Title 7, ADA, Americans with Disabilities Act or something, those complaints would be filed with the EEOC, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. If it’s a labor violation, those are filed with the Department of Labor or the National Labor Relations Board handles certain things as it relates to employment cases. If it’s some type of civil rights action involving the police and they’ve done something that they shouldn’t do, you want to call a lawyer immediately on those things because those are lawsuits that are going to need to be filed. Most times a lawyer will add a demand letter demanding evidence or preservation of evidence, letters saying don’t mess with this evidence or what we call a FOIA request, Freedom of Information Act request, requesting body camera footage and reports or whatnot about what has happened in the case, and then they proceed from there whether to file the matter in court. Sometimes if there are underlying state claims, you have to file a notice of claim. If you don’t file that notice of claim within a certain amount of time, you lose the rights to file and the window is very small. You want to make sure that you call a lawyer immediately and talk to them about it because they’ll know exactly what to do. They’ll know the time frames when things need to be filed and which agency that these complaints need to be filed with or whether it needs to be a direct lawsuit filed in court. You can call our office. We do quite a bit of civil rights litigation here, from all different perspectives, and we’ll be more than happy to talk to you about your civil rights claim.