NEW YORK: A 38-year-old hijab-wearing police officer has sued the New York Police Department (NYPD), saying that fellow officers bullied her by calling her “terrorist, Taliban” and while others tried to tear the headscarf off her head, a media report said on Thursday.
Danielle Alamrani, who joined the department in 2006, converted to Islam a year later.
According to a new lawsuit, she started getting harassed, bullied, and even beat up, when she began wearing a hijab to work in 2008.
Once she started going to work in head garb, Alamrani’s fellow officers retaliated by calling her names like “terrorist” and “Taliban” and telling her “that she should not be a police officer”, she claimed in a lawsuit filed in the Manhattan federal court.
Things got so bad that in 2012, she was “physically attacked” by two officers who “attempted to rip her hijab off of her head”, the New York Post quoted the lawsuit as saying.
The officers, including the equal employment opportunity liaison for her district, screamed “Muslim b***h” while they attacked her and said, “I will punch you in the face”, according to the lawsuit.
Alamrani said she has social media evidence of the harassment. She collected the evidence in 2015 after a fellow officer posted pictures on Facebook of her in her hijab at the gun range.
That prompted her co-workers, who didn’t like what they saw, to make comments such as “f**king disgrace.” They also called her a “moving target,” the lawsuit said.
“Many comments included threats of violence,” said her lawyer Jesse Curtis Rose.
Alamrani said she is seeking damages in an amount to be determined at trial.