Local Muslims applaud an agreement worked out with St. Louis County law enforcement officials over the wearing of an Islamic scarf by a woman temporarily held in the county jail.
In a meeting that included St. Louis County Police Chief Tim Fitch and local Muslim leaders, it was agreed that any arrested Muslim woman wearing a hijab — or Muslim headscarf- would be screened by a female officer in a private area and would have her scarf returned following that screening.
Local spokesman for the Council on American Islamic Relations — Faizen Syed — says he’s pleased with how the meeting went:
“They are going to start implementing this policy immediately and the police chief said if we’d known about this policy we could have taken action even sooner.”
A couple of weeks ago, a local Muslim woman who was jailed for several hours because of an unpaid traffic ticket reported that an officer forcibly removed her hijab and she was then forced to keep her head uncovered for some time.