NYPD officers attacked a fellow officer and called her "a Muslim bitch" and subjected her to years of discriminatory treatment, according to a lawsuit filed against the city, the NYPD and numerous individual NYPD officers earlier this week.
In her lawsuit, filed in federal court on February 2nd, Officer Danielle Alamrani claims that her NYPD career was going fine after she joined the force in 2006 and was assigned to the 94th Precinct in Greenpoint. However, after she began wearing a hijab at work, in accordance with her Muslim faith, and despite getting a religious accommodation to do so, she claims that she was subject to rampant discrimination by her co-workers. Alamrani claims that her bosses told her not to wear the head scarf on patrol because it was a safety hazard, that her co-workers called her things like "terrorist" and "Taliban," that she was told she was a disgrace to the NYPD and on one occasion in 2010 a sergeant joked in front of her entire unit that he hoped she didn't "detonate on patrol." Alamrani also claims in her suit that because she kept wearing her headscarf, she was frequently denied opportunities to go out on patrol, which meant losing out on opportunities to make overtime, "as a vast majority of overtime is earned due to arrests made on patrol."
In one particularly disturbing incident in December 2012, Alamrani claims that two officers in the precinct tried to rip off her hijab, referred to her as "a Muslim bitch" and one told her "I will punch you in the face." Alamrani's suit says the officers who allegedly did this weren't disciplined and therefore felt empowered to continue harassing her. Two years later, in 2014, Alamrani's suit says she and her husband were arrested after a neighbor made a noise complaint about their children despite a responding officer finding the children asleep when they came to her home. The suit claims that the responding officer also detained Alamrani's children for eight hours "just to harass her."
And in November 2015, shortly before leaving the 94th Precinct, Alamrani claims that a fellow officer took a picture of her when she was at a gun range for work reasons and then posted the picture to Facebook. Other police officers, including her coworkers, commented on the photo that Alamrani was "a moving target," "a fucking disgrace," that she was unfit to do her job and a variety of violent violent threats.
The suit seeks unspecified damages as a result of the city and the NYPD allowing a hostile work environment to exist where Alamrani could be discriminated against because of her religion.
A spokesperson for the City Law Department told Gothamist in an email that "the Law Department will review the complaint and respond accordingly."
