New York City will pay $17.5 million to settle a class-action lawsuit aimed at forcing women to remove their hijabs for mugshots, their lawyers and advocates said in a statement Friday.
More than 3,600 people in the class-action lawsuit will be eligible for payments of about $7,000 to $13,000 nearly four years after police agreed to change their policy on religious head coverings.
The settlement must be approved by the federal judge overseeing the case.
“This is an important step for the privacy and religious rights of New Yorkers,” said Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the defense organization Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. “The NYPD should never have stripped these religious New Yorkers of their head coverings and dignity. This was not just an attack on their rights, but on everything our city claims to believe in. :
On March 16, 2018, Jamilla Clark and Arwa Aziz filed a lawsuit against the city, alleging that police made them remove their hijabs for mugshots. The two women became the named plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit, which covers arrests that occurred between March 16, 2014 and August 23, 2021 in the city. Clark had been arrested for filing a bogus class-action lawsuit against her abusive husband, according to court documents. She said the New York Police Department threatened to sue her if she did not remove her hijab. Court documents say an NYPD officer took a photo of Clark while she cried and begged to put the blankets back on.
“When they forced me to take off my hijab, I felt like I was naked. I’m not sure words can express how exposed and violated I felt,” Clark said in a communicated. “I am so proud today to have played a role in securing justice for thousands of New Yorkers. This settlement proves that I was right all those years ago when I said it was wrong to remove my hijab for a passport photo. I hope no New Yorker is proven wrong.” I must never experience what I experienced.”
“We express our gratitude to Muslim women who courageously persisted in this dispute“, prompting a policy change that benefits many people with similar religious requirements,” Afaf Nasher, executive director of CAIR-NY, said in a statement.
The NYPD changed its policy in 2020, allowing all arrestees to keep their religious head coverings unless they fall under limited exceptions, according to court documents.
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