NYC will pay $17.5M to settle lawsuit alleging women were forced to remove hijabs in mugshots

NEW YORK – The city agreed Friday to pay $17.5 million to settle a class-action lawsuit that alleged police officers forced two women to remove hijabs while mugshot photos were being taken, lawyers for the women said Friday.

The case, filed in 2018, stemmed from the arrests of Muslim American women Jamilla Clark and Arwa Aziz. In court records, they alleged New York City Police officers threatened them to remove their headscarves, and the two felt ashamed after being forced to do so.

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“When they forced me to take off my hijab, I felt as if I were naked,” Clark said in a statement released by her lawyers and advocates. “I’m not sure if words can capture how exposed and violated I felt.”

The settlement announced Friday still requires approval by U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres in federal court in New York. 

Clark and Aziz’s attorney, O. Andrew F. Wilson, said forcing someone to remove religious clothing is akin to a strip search. The women alleged the removal of their hijabs for booking photographs violated their First Amendment rights, as well as federal religious protections and state law.

“This is a milestone for New Yorkers’ privacy and religious rights,”said Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a civil rights group that provided legal representation for the plaintiffs. “The NYPD should never have stripped these religious New Yorkers of their head coverings and dignity. This wasn’t just an assault on their rights, but on everything our city claims to believe in."

In 2020, the New York City Police Department changed its policy as a response to the lawsuit, allowing people to be photographed with religious garb as long as their faces weren’t covered, the New York Times reported. Advocates supporting the lawsuit said the NYPD has practiced a policy of keeping mugshots as part of its facial recognition surveillance program.

The agreement maintains the city denied engaging in a pattern or process that deprived people of their protected rights, court records said. The city didn’t admit to the specific claims made by Clark and Aziz.

Nick Paolucci, a spokesperson for the New York City Law Department, said the resolution was in the best interest of all parties.

“This settlement resulted in a positive reform for the NYPD,” he said in a statement. “The agreement carefully balances the department’s respect for firmly held religious beliefs with the important law enforcement need to take arrest photos.”

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Clark and Aziz both wore hijabs in line with their Muslim faith, which covers a woman’s hair, ears and neck, but leaves her face exposed. Many observant Muslim women wear it at all times when they’re in the presence of men who aren’t part of their immediate family.

In January 2017, Clark said she wept with her hijab down around her shoulders at NYPD headquarters in Manhattan, and begged to put it back on, court records said. She said she had been arrested for violating an order of protection by her ex-husband, which she said was false. 

Eight months later, in August, Aziz had her photo taken with her hijab at her neck, in a Brooklyn precinct after voluntarily turning herself over to NYPD for violating a protective order against her sister-in-law that she said she didn’t commit. She, too, cried during the photos that had to be taken in front of several male NYPD officers and over 30 men incarcerated, according to court records.

As part of the agreement, the city prepared a class list of people who had their religious head covering removed for an official NYPD photo, according to court records. Attorneys estimate the proposed settlement could make over 3,600 people eligible for payments between approximately $7,000 and $13,000. They encouraged anyone who had their head coverings removed for a mugshot between March 16, 2014 and Aug. 23, 2021 to also file. 

“We send our appreciation to the Muslim women who bravely persisted with this litigation, prompting policy change that benefit many with similar religious garb requirements,” Afar Nasher, executive director of the civil rights group Council on American-Islamic Relations New York chapter, said in a statement.

Notices of the settlement would go out to people identified in police records. Information would be available in English and also in Arabic, Bengali, Spanish, Urdu and Hebrew.