The city has agreed to a $17.5 million payout to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by two hijab-wearing Muslim women who said the NYPD violated their civil rights by forcing them to remove their religious head coverings for mugshot photos.
The women — Jamila Clark, a resident of Cedar Grove, New Jersey, and Arwa Aziz, a Brooklyn resident — were arrested within eight months of each other in 2017 on charges that they violated orders of protection. Both women said they told police officers that they were bound by their religion to wear their hijabs at all times, but their pleas were refused.
Clark “sobbed in One Police Plaza with her hijab pushed down around her shoulders,” according to the complaint. “Like many Muslim women whose religious beliefs dictate that they wear a hijab, Ms. Clark felt exposed and violated without hers — as if she were naked in a public space,” the lawsuit alleged.
The settlement represented a “milestone win to protect New Yorkers’ privacy and First Amendment rights,” said the women’s attorney Albert Fox Cahn, who is also the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a civil rights organization. As a result of the lawsuit, the NYPD changed its policy in 2020 to allow people with head coverings to retain them for photographs.
Nick Paolucci, a spokesperson for the city’s Law Department, said in a statement that the settlement had “resulted in a positive reform for the NYPD.”
“The agreement carefully balances the department’s respect for firmly held religious beliefs with the important law enforcement need to take arrest photos,” he said. “This resolution was in the best interest of all parties.”
Attorneys for the plaintiffs estimated that as many as 3,600 people of different faiths would qualify for a share of the settlement, based on similar experiences with the police.
The complaint argued that other police departments had adjusted their policies to accommodate religious sensitivities,…
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