Four retired Asian New York Police Department captains are suing the NYPD over allegedly discriminating against Asians when promoting captains.
According to the New York Daily News, lawyer John Scola filed the suit in the Brooklyn Supreme Court on behalf of Ahmad Alli, a retired Asian NYPD captain who spent 10 years in his role without getting promoted. Scola has since added three other plaintiffs to the case and hopes to turn it into a class-action lawsuit.
The lawsuit alleges that about two of 10 Asian captains get promoted to captain compared to six out of 10 white captains.
Scola also plans to use data from a 2018 internal report authored by an NYPD lawyer and three deputy inspectors with the department’s Police Management Institute. According to the New York Daily News, the report examined data from 2015 to 2017 and found that on average Asians spent more time as captains (7.2 years) before getting promoted to deputy inspector than any other minority group. The average was also longer than the averages for white men and white women.
The NYPD has been accused of workplace discrimination several times before. According to Gothamist, Karen Ramirez, a 39-year-old police officer, said her co-workers and superiors retaliated against her after she began wearing a mask to work as the pandemic took off in early March 2020. In January 2021, the head of the NYPD’s workplace discrimination office retired after serving a 30-day suspension without pay for sending racist messages, NBC New York reports.
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