Two young Muslim women, both college students, made their way to upper Manhattan last summer to protest the Gaza conflict outside the afterparty for a kickoff rally for Kamala Harris’s campaign for president.
The August evening soon spun out of control.
One of the women, Zarmeen Azam, 20, alleges in a lawsuit filed Sunday that NYPD Chief Ruel Stephenson “clutched (Azam’s) throat with one hand, strangling her with the fabric of her hijab” as he brandished his baton at other protesters.
Stephenson then “dragged her along the ground for several long minutes,” the suit filed in Manhattan Federal Court claims.
“I was in so much pain I think I even blacked out,” Azam told the Daily News. “I was trying to loosen my scarf so it wouldn’t continue to choke me.”
The other woman, Shajnin Howlader, 19, claims in the suit Stephenson “pushed” her and then Sgt. Joseph Spalding allegedly looked her “in the face and yanked on (her) hijab.”
“As the hijab was coming off her head, it tangled and caught around her throat, cutting off her ability to breathe or speak,” the suit reads.
“It felt like I was being stripped,” Howlader told The News. “I keep thinking back to that moment of so many eyes on me.”
A hijab is a headscarf worn by many Muslim women that symbolizes their faith. The act of forcibly removing one is considered a serious violation of privacy, like strip-searching someone without consent.
“The NYPD needs to treat Muslim women the same way they treat anybody else. They cannot target women’s hijabs as a way to terrorize people,” said Andrew Wilson, an attorney with the firm Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel which is representing the women.
“We see it happening over and over again.”
A chaotic scene
The NYPD declined to comment on the lawsuit, but police sources said the overall conflict was caused by aggressive protesters who suddenly materialized at the Hamilton Heights restaurant where the gathering following the Harris event was being held.
Twenty people barged into the restaurant and broke vases and dishes and damaged plants, causing more than $5,000 in damage, the source said. At one point, an officer was assaulted with an object. In the end, 14 protesters were arrested.
The restaurant had to create a GoFundMe to raise money to repair the damage from the incident.
Outside, the protesters threw smoke bombs, video posted by Fox 5 New York shows. The video also shows Stephenson and other cops with their backs to a building’s wall surrounded by protesters on all sides.
“These wild protesters stormed a community restaurant and created an incredibly dangerous situation,” a law enforcement source said. “It’s clear that the cops did everything they could to protect the patrons and disperse the aggressive crowd, even while getting attacked themselves.”
Class action over hijabs
In April the city agreed to pay $17.5 million to settle a six-year-old class action suit over an NYPD practice of removing hijabs for booking photos.
In 2020, as a result of that case, the NYPD rewrote policy to allow head coverings in booking photos — a rule that an officer violated in Azam’s case on Aug. 14, the lawsuit claims.
Christina John, a staff attorney with the Council on American Islamic Relations, said the group has logged five similar hijab-related complaints since that April court settlement.
”You actually can’t look at it as anything but an intimidation tactic,” John said.
Of Stephenson, who commands roughly 3,000 cops north of 59th Street, she said, “He seems to be leading by example and making it OK for other cops to also do it.”
In January, eight other New Yorkers sued over a well-known incident at a 2020 George Floyd protest in the Bronx where cops constricted protesters into a small area, a police tactic known as kettling, the complaint in that case states.
Two of those eight, Sazia Patel and Umahani Hamad, allege in the suit officers forcefully removed their hijabs during the incident.
Patel claimed in the suit she demanded to be given her hijab for the booking photo but cops mockingly put it on her head and it soon fell off.
Hamad claimed she demanded her hijab at Central Booking. According to the suit, a cop responded, “Well, you’re wearing earrings for male attention so why not show us your hair too?”
Harris campaign kickoff
On Aug. 14, after the Harris campaign kick-off event, her supporters gathered at the Bird in Hand restaurant on Broadway in Hamilton Heights. Protesters soon followed to demand Harris and other elected officials call for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Both women say a large number of cops soon arrived, outnumbering the protesters. Tension escalated rapidly. The lawsuit claims cops began kettling the protesters and doused them with pepper spray.
Howlader, a sophomore computer science major at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania, had taken the subway to upper Manhattan from her home. She had attended a few previous Gaza protests.
Approximately 300 pro-Gaza protesters demonstrated across from an event supporting Kamala Harris on Broadway at W. 135 St. on Aug. 14. (Sam Costanza for New York Daily News)
She found herself crowded in with protesters on one side and cops and a residential building on the other.
Stephenson then shoved her and Spalding grabbed her hijab, the lawsuit claims. The garment got stuck around her neck but Spalding kept pulling, choking her. Meanwhile, a second cop pepper-sprayed her.
Spalding held on to the hijab. Other protesters yanked it out of his hands and poured water into her eyes the lawsuit claims.
Howlader wasn’t arrested but her eyes and scalp stung and her body ached, she said.
Azam, a junior majoring in biomedical science at Mercy University, drove herself to the protest. She has attended several dozen demonstrations in the past year over the Gaza conflict.
“I’ve been forcefully shoved by the NYPD, my hijab has almost come off but it was never ripped off my head the way it was that night,” she said.
Stephenson, the lawsuit states, was moving through the crowd, then turned and yelled at Azam, “Don’t put your hands on me!”
She claims she hadn’t touched him. “I thought I was going to die,” she said.
She spent three hours at an NYPD precinct stationhouse, the lawsuit says. Her hijab was caught in her handcuffs but the cops declined to free it.
In a holding cell, she refastened her now-ripped hijab, the lawsuit says. She was released with desk appearance tickets for “fighting or violent, tumultuous or threatening behavior” and illegal congregating. The tickets were dismissed a month later, the lawsuit says.
“Both my shoes were gone. I had lost my bag with my phone and keys,” Azam said. “Thank God, a random person had it at the jail or I wouldn’t have been able to get home.”
Howlader went home the protest on the subway.
“As a police officer, you have one job — to serve and protect everyone regardless of what we wear,” she said. “That night I didn’t feel like I was being protected at all.”