(Courthouse News) New York City agreed on Friday to pay a $17.5 million settlement to resolve a class-action civil rights lawsuit brought by New York women who were forced to remove their religious headscarves in NYPD mugshot photos for the department’s facial recognition database.
Two Muslim women — Jamilla Clark from New Jersey and Arwa Aziz from Brooklyn — along with the Muslim advocacy group Turning Point for Women and Families brought a class-action complaint against the city in 2018, claiming that the New York Police Department’s policy of forcing religious-observant women to remove their hijabs violated the New York State Constitution, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA).
