No Clearly Established Supervisory Duty to Oversee Officers on Private Paid Details; Pattern-or-No-Training Required to Defeat Qualified Immunity in § 1983 Supervision/Training/Discipline Claims

Introduction

Hankins v. Martin (5th Cir. Jan. 5, 2026) arises from a June 2020 traffic stop conducted by two off-duty police officers working a private neighborhood security detail. Plaintiff-appellant Bilal Hankins alleged that the stop lacked reasonable suspicion and involved excessive force, bringing federal claims under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 against the stopping officers and additional § 1983 claims against supervisors. He also asserted Monell-type theories against the entities involved and related state-law claims.

This appeal is narrow: it concerns whether the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) supervisors of Officer Ramon Pierre can be held liable under § 1983 for (i) failure to supervise Pierre on his private paid detail, (ii) failure to train, and (iii) failure to discipline—and, critically, whether the supervisors are protected by qualified immunity.

Summary of the Opinion

The Fifth Circuit (per curiam) affirmed summary judgment for the supervisors on qualified immunity. Even assuming Hankins had alleged a violation of a clearly established constitutional right by the subordinate officer, the court held Hankins failed to show the supervisors’ conduct was objectively unreasonable under clearly established law. The court emphasized:

No clearly established state-law duty required HANO supervisors to supervise an officer while working a private paid detail.
Failure-to-train liability required either a pattern of similar violations tied to inadequate training, or the rare “single incident” scenario where the officer received no training whatsoever in an obviously necessary area.
Failure-to-discipline liability failed for lack of causation and lack of a similar pattern establishing deliberate indifference.

Analysis

Precedents Cited

1) Qualified immunity and summary judgment framework

Stidham v. Tex. Comm'n on Priv. Sec., 418 F.3d 486 (5th Cir. 2005): supplied the de novo standard of review for qualified-immunity summary judgment.
Joseph ex rel. Joseph v. Bartlett, 981 F.3d 319 (5th Cir. 2020) (quoting Orr v. Copeland, 844 F.3d 484 (5th Cir. 2016)): supported the burden shift—once qualified immunity is invoked, the plaintiff must show the defense is unavailable.
Spiller v. Harris Cnty., 113 F.4th 573 (5th Cir. 2024): reiterated that, in qualified-immunity posture, the plaintiff’s version of disputed facts must amount to a violation of clearly established law.
Hampton v. Oktibbeha Cnty. Sheriff's Dep't, 480 F.3d 358 (5th Cir. 2007) and Crane v. City of Arlington, 50 F.4th 453 (5th Cir. 2022): framed qualified immunity as an “objective reasonableness” inquiry tied to whether the right was “clearly established.”

2) Limits on supervisory liability under § 1983

Hicks v. LeBlanc, 81 F.4th 497 (5th Cir. 2023) (quoting Thompkins v. Belt, 828 F.2d 298 (5th Cir. 1987)): underscored that supervisors are not vicariously liable for subordinates’ actions.
Porter v. Epps, 659 F.3d 440 (5th Cir. 2011): provided the “affirmative participation” principle and the elements for supervisory failure-to-train claims (also used to assess the claim here).
Tuttle v. Sepolio, 68 F.4th 969 (5th Cir. 2023) and Goodman v. Harris Cnty., 571 F.3d 388 (5th Cir. 2009): were key to the failure-to-supervise framework, including the notion that supervisory liability can arise when a duty imposed by state or local law is breached, causing the constitutional injury.

3) “Paid details,” state-law duty, and scope-of-employment authorities

Brasseaux v. Town of Mamou, 99-1584 (La. 1/19/00), 752 So. 2d 815, and Wright v. Skate Country, Inc., 98-0217 (La. App. 4 Cir. 5/12/99), 734 So. 2d 874: supported the Louisiana principle that off-duty officers working paid details are typically employees of the paying private entity, limiting public-employer responsibility.
Duryea v. Handy, 96-1018 (La. App. 4 Cir. 10/3/97), 700 So. 2d 1123, and Luccia v. Cummings, 94-416 (La. App. 5 Cir. 11/16/94), 646 So. 2d 1142: reinforced that municipalities are not liable when uniformed officers are acting as private security (parade security; bouncer).
Powers v. United States, 783 F.3d 570 (5th Cir. 2015): central to rejecting Hankins’s attempt to derive a supervisory duty from departmental-manual language stating officers remain “governed by all Department rules, orders, and procedures” while on paid detail. The Fifth Circuit treated Powers as confirming that such rule-governance does not equate to public-employee status (or a supervisory duty) during private details.
LeBrane v. Lewis, 292 So. 2d 216 (La. 1974): cited for the proposition that the court could affirm qualified immunity without definitively resolving the state-law scope-of-employment issue.

4) Deliberate indifference and pattern/single-incident doctrines

Connick v. Thompson, 563 U.S. 51 (2011) and Estate of Davis ex rel. McCully v. City of N. Richland Hills, 406 F.3d 375 (5th Cir. 2005): set the high bar for deliberate indifference—more than negligence or gross negligence.
Damond v. City of Rayville, 127 F.4th 935 (5th Cir. 2025): supplied the “objective exposure to a substantial risk of serious harm” phrasing used to reject Hankins’s unsupported assertions of risk.
Ball v. LeBlanc, 792 F.3d 584 (5th Cir. 2015), Pinkston v. Kuiper, 67 F.4th 237 (5th Cir. 2023), and Cleveland v. Bell, 938 F.3d 672 (5th Cir. 2019): were used to clarify that plaintiffs must still show awareness of facts indicating a substantial risk; Ball did not eliminate that requirement.
Thompson v. Upshur Cnty., 245 F.3d 447 (5th Cir. 2001) and Zarnow v. City of Wichita Falls, 614 F.3d 161 (5th Cir. 2010): reinforced that, to impose failure-to-train liability, the plaintiff must identify with specificity how training is defective, and objective unreasonableness must be shown to overcome qualified immunity.
Brumfield v. Hollins, 551 F.3d 322 (5th Cir. 2008) and Sanders-Burns v. City of Plano, 594 F.3d 366 (5th Cir. 2010): supported the “pattern of similar violations” requirement and the insistence that prior incidents must be fairly similar to the alleged constitutional harm.
Littell v. Hous. Indep. Sch. Dist., 894 F.3d 616 (5th Cir. 2018), Burge v. St. Tammany Par., 336 F.3d 363 (5th Cir. 2003), and Brown v. Bryan Cnty., 219 F.3d 450 (5th Cir. 2000): framed and limited “single-incident liability.”
Hutcheson v. Dallas Cnty., 994 F.3d 477 (5th Cir. 2021) and Roberts v. City of Shreveport, 397 F.3d 287 (5th Cir. 2005) (citing City of Canton v. Harris, 489 U.S. 378 (1989)): constrained single-incident theories to rare situations—generally where no training exists—and prohibited reframing “my injury happened” as “training must have been inadequate.”

5) Failure to discipline and causation

Deville v. Marcantel, 567 F.3d 156 (5th Cir. 2009): supplied the elements for failure-to-discipline claims and supported the causation holding that a post-incident investigation cannot cause the pre-incident constitutional violation.
Verastique v. City of Dallas, 106 F.4th 427 (5th Cir. 2024) (citing Armstrong v. Ashley, 60 F.4th 262 (5th Cir. 2023)): reinforced the need for a causal link between discipline failures and the violation, and the court’s unwillingness to infer deliberate indifference from dissimilar prior conduct.

Legal Reasoning

A) Failure to supervise an officer on a private paid detail

The court treated the existence of a supervisory duty as the gateway issue. Relying on Louisiana authority and the enabling statute (La. Rev. Stat. § 40:456), it concluded Louisiana law did not clearly establish that HANO supervisors must supervise an officer during private paid-detail work. Louisiana cases cited by the court generally characterize the paying private entity as the relevant employer for such details, weakening the claim that HANO supervisors had a legally imposed supervisory duty in that context.

Hankins’s attempt to derive a duty from the HANO Police Department Operations Manual failed because (as Powers v. United States was read to confirm) internal rule-governance over officer conduct on paid details does not, without more, create a clearly established supervisory obligation to actively supervise those details—particularly where the record showed the private entity (Hurstville) actually supervised the detail and appointed its own overseer.

The court also explained that, even if one assumed a duty existed, Hankins still could not show “objective unreasonableness” because he lacked evidence meeting the deliberate-indifference requirement (no facts showing the supervisors were aware of a substantial risk that Pierre would commit the alleged kind of Fourth Amendment violation).

B) Failure to train

The court accepted there was a duty to train, but held Hankins did not carry his heightened burden to defeat qualified immunity. Two core deficiencies drove the result:

No pattern of similar violations. Hankins pointed to “insubordination,” “discourteous” behavior, and unspecified “complaints,” but he did not show prior incidents fairly similar to the alleged unlawful seizure/excessive force, as required by Brumfield v. Hollins and Sanders-Burns v. City of Plano.
No viable single-incident theory. The court applied Hutcheson v. Dallas Cnty. to stress that single-incident liability is generally limited to situations where the officer received no training whatsoever in a critical area. Here, Pierre completed state-required training, including instruction touching search and seizure, use of force, and statutorily required modules such as de-escalation and “bias policing recognition” under La. Rev. Stat. § 40:2404.2(c). Against that record, the claimed “obviousness” of the risk did not hold.

C) Failure to discipline

The failure-to-discipline theory failed chiefly on causation and similarity. The court applied Deville v. Marcantel to reject reliance on an allegedly “cursory” post-incident investigation, because an after-the-fact investigation cannot have caused the earlier stop. It also held Hankins did not show a prior pattern of similar, discipline-worthy incidents that would make it objectively unreasonable for supervisors not to discipline Pierre in a way that would have prevented the alleged violation.

Impact

Although the opinion is “not designated for publication,” it meaningfully illustrates (and reinforces) several practical rules likely to shape future litigation in the Fifth Circuit:

Paid details and supervisory duty: Plaintiffs seeking to hold public supervisors liable for conduct occurring on private details face a threshold obstacle: they must identify a clearly established state or local law duty requiring supervision of that off-duty work, not merely departmental rule-governance language.
Deliberate indifference is evidentiary, not rhetorical: Assertions of “misconduct” or a “culture of impunity” will not substitute for facts showing awareness of a substantial risk of the type of harm that occurred.
Single-incident liability remains rare: Absent near-total lack of training in a critical area (as in Littell v. Hous. Indep. Sch. Dist.), courts are unlikely to find a single incident sufficient to overcome qualified immunity for supervisory training claims.
Failure-to-discipline requires tight causation: Post-event investigative shortcomings typically cannot establish causation for the underlying constitutional violation.

Complex Concepts Simplified

Qualified immunity: A doctrine shielding government officials from damages unless (1) they violated a constitutional right and (2) the unlawfulness was “clearly established” such that a reasonable official would have known their conduct was unlawful.
Supervisory liability (no vicarious liability): Supervisors are not automatically liable for subordinates. A supervisor must have personal involvement or must have caused the violation through an objectively unreasonable failure to supervise/train/discipline under clearly established standards.
Deliberate indifference: A high fault standard—more than negligence—requiring proof that officials knew of and disregarded a substantial risk of serious harm (or, in training cases, that obvious deficiencies made constitutional violations highly predictable).
Pattern requirement vs. single-incident liability: Ordinarily, plaintiffs must show similar prior incidents put decisionmakers on notice that training or supervision was inadequate. “Single-incident” is a narrow exception, typically where there was effectively no training in an area so basic that violations are obvious and predictable.
Paid detail: Off-duty work where an officer provides security services for a private entity. Here, Louisiana authorities cited by the court tend to treat the private payer as the relevant employer for responsibility purposes, complicating claims that the public agency’s supervisors had a legal duty to supervise the detail.

Conclusion

Hankins v. Martin affirms that supervisory § 1983 claims arising from an officer’s conduct on a private paid detail face steep qualified-immunity barriers absent a clearly established legal duty to supervise that off-duty work. The decision also underscores the Fifth Circuit’s insistence on concrete evidence of deliberate indifference—typically a pattern of similar violations—or, in rare cases, the functional absence of training. For litigants, the case highlights that internal manuals and generalized allegations of poor behavior are unlikely to overcome qualified immunity without a legally grounded duty and tightly matched notice-and-causation proof.

No Clearly Established Supervisory Duty to Oversee Officers on Private Paid Details; Pattern-or-No-Training Required to Defeat Qualified Immunity in § 1983 Supervision/Training/Discipline Claims (Hankins v. Martin)