appeal unless they are necessarily resolved by our qualified-immunity determination on the individual-capacity claims. See Brennan v. Twp. of Northville, 78 F.3d 1152, 1157-58 (6th Cir.1996); cf. Myers v. Potter, 422 F.3d 347, 358 (6th Cir.2005) (reversing a district court that prematurely granted summary judgment to defendant in his official capacity on a failure-to-train claim, finding that the plaintiff should have been granted more time to conduct discovery).
In a case such as this, where the supervisor is also the policymaker, an individual-capacity claim may appear indistinguishable from an official-capacity or municipal claim, but these failure-to-train claims turn on two different legal principles. For individual liability on a failure-to-train or supervise theory, the defendant supervisor must be found to have “ ‘encouraged the specific incident of misconduct or in some other way directly participated in it.’”
Phillips v. Roane Cnty., 534 F.3d 531, 543 (6th Cir.2008) (quoting
Shehee v. Luttrell, 199 F.3d 295, 300 (6th Cir.1999)). A plaintiff must demonstrate that the defendant supervisor “ ‘at least implicitly authorized, approved, or knowingly acquiesced in the unconstitutional conduct of the offending officers.’ ”
Id. (quoting
Shehee, 199 F.3d at 300). A mere failure to act will not suffice to establish supervisory liability.
Gregory v. City of Louisville, 444 F.3d 725, 751 (6th Cir.2006).
At oral argument, Plaintiffs argued that this Court’s opinions in Taylor v. Michigan Department of Corrections, 69 F.3d 76 (6th Cir.1995), and Hill v. Marshall, 962 F.2d 1209 (6th Cir.1992), dictate otherwise; but they are incorrect. In both Taylor and Hill, it was the defendant supervisors’ active engagement in a function of their position that directly resulted in injury to the plaintiffs. In Hill, the defendant supervisor referred inmate complaints that he received personally to the nursing staff that he knew was wrongly altering and destroying inmate prescriptions. Hill, 962 F.2d at 1213. In Taylor, it was the defendant’s actual performance of his job function (approving inmate transfers despite knowing that inmate files were not reviewed prior to transfers) that resulted in a direct injury to the plaintiff. Taylor, 69 F.3d at 80. This sort of “direct participation” or, at the very least, active acquiescence in the known misconduct are likely examples of the outer bounds of the “active performance” necessary for a supervisory liability claim. See Gregory, 444 F.3d at 752. “[Liability must lie upon more than a mere right to control employees and cannot rely on simple negligence.” Id. at 751. There must be some conduct on the supervisor’s part to which a plaintiff can point that is directly correlated with the plaintiff’s injury. See id. at 752.
Contrast a failure-to-train or supervise claim against a municipality; this is a broader claim concerning the custom or policy of a municipality, Monell v. Dep’t of Soc. Servs., 436 U.S. 658, 690-91, 98 S.Ct. 2018, 56 L.Ed.2d 611 (1978), and thus would implicate the conduct of a defendant supervisor insofar as he acted with deliberate indifference in his official capacity as a policymaker. See Phillips, 534 F.3d at 543; Campbell v. City of Springboro, 700 F.3d 779, 794 (6th Cir.2012). Such claims do not require direct participation in or encouragement of the specific acts; rather, these claims may be premised on a failure to act. See Heyerman v. Cnty. of Calhoun, 680 F.3d 642, 648 (6th Cir.2012). A plaintiff must establish that the municipality, through its policymakers, failed to train or supervise employees despite: 1) having actual or constructive knowledge of a pattern of similar constitutional violations by untrained employees, see Bd. of Comm’rs of Bryan Cnty. v. Brown, 520 U.S. 397, 407-08, 117 S.Ct. 1382, 137 L.Ed.2d 626