NYC agrees to pay $17.5m to thousands of Muslims police ordered to remove their ... trends now
New York City has agreed to pay $17.5 million to settle a lawsuit filed by two Muslim women who were forced to remove their hijabs for police mugshots.
Jamilla Clark and Arwa Aziz filed the class-action lawsuit in 2018 claiming they felt shamed and exposed and liked their treatment to be strip-searched.
'When they forced me to take off my hijab, I felt as if I were naked. I'm not sure if words can capture how exposed and violated I felt,' Clark said.
'I'm so proud today to have played a part in getting justice for thousands of New Yorkers.'
Clark was arrested at Manhattan Family Court on January 9, 2017, for allegedly violating a bogus protective order filed by her abusive former husband.
Jamilla Clark (pictured) and Arwa Aziz filed the class-action lawsuit in 2018 claiming they felt shamed and exposed and liked their treatment to be strip-searched
The complaint alleged the husband 'fabricated these charges to secure immigration status as a purported victim of domestic violence'.
Clark was arrested a different time on the same trumped-up charges, but they were dismissed.
The lawsuit said officers at Police Headquarters at One Police Plaza threatened to prosecute Clark, who was sobbing after they ignored her pleas, if she did not remove her head covering.
She claimed a police supervisor 'made numerous hostile comments about Muslims' after she refused to remove the hijab.
'Male officers touched Ms Clark repeatedly, even though she explained that such contact violated her religion, and denied her a place to wash for prayer and a place to pray,' the lawsuit read.
They agreed to let a female officer take the mugshot, but male officers watched on a security camera and five of them were showed the photo afterwards.
The lawsuit claimed Clark was so 'agitated and distraught by the coerced removal of her hijab' occurring while in custody that she was too afraid to wear one in public for the next month.
Clark said she was 'haunted' by the photo existing on the NYPD database and being repeatedly viewed by male strangers.
Clark (pictured around the time of her arrest in January 2017) said she was 'haunted' by the photo existing on the NYPD database and being repeatedly viewed by male strangers
Aziz was arrested arrested after she handed herself in to police in Brooklyn on August 30, 2017, after being accused of breaching a bogus protective order filed by her sister-in-law.
The allegedly abusive sister-in-law repeatedly asked police to arrest Aziz and
