Two groups that protect workers said Columbus Mayor Michael B. Coleman and Police Chief Kim Jacobs should reconsider their prohibition of head scarves for female Muslim police-officer candidates because it condones prejudice even if it’s unintentional.
“We’re trying to convince the mayor and the chief that they’ve made a mistake,” said Frederick M. Gittes, a Columbus lawyer and president of Protecting Ohio’s Employees, a nonprofit group that promotes workplace diversity and fair-employment practices.
“It’s good for the department, good for the public and good for the officers to have a diverse police force and to allow individual adaptations for religious reasons that don’t affect officers’ safety,” he said.
Gittes sent a letter today to Coleman and Jacobs on behalf of his group and the Ohio Employment Lawyers Association, a group of attorneys who represent workers in labor, employment and civil-rights actions.
Gittes said there are legal issues with the city’s policy: The letter cites federal law and an Ohio Supreme Court decision concerning protections for religious beliefs and practices.
But it’s more about the reasons that Coleman and Jacobs gave for the policy, he said.
The letter from the groups cites an Aug. 17 Dispatch story that quotes Coleman saying, “When officers go out into the community, they should be identified as Columbus police officers, not Muslim police officers, not Christian police officers, not Jewish police officers, not Hindus, Baptists or anything else.”
The same story quotes Jacobs saying, “I want whoever pulls up to the scene as being recognized as a Columbus police officer that doesn’t turn anyone off.”
In the letter, the two groups say that the statements by Coleman and Jacobs “fail to recognize the importance of a diverse and representative police force and condone prejudice, however unintentionally.”
“Your justification for the headscarf policy would also justify excluding African-American and female officers from patrol duties because their presence might ‘turn’ these community members ' off,’ ” the letter says.
It says that in a city with a sizable Somali Muslim population, “never coming across a female officer wearing a head scarf sends the opposite message to that population – that the Division of Police is not neutral – just as an all-white or all-male police force would (and previously did) send that message of exclusion to female and African-American residents.”
Columbus has the second-largest Somali population in the nation, an estimated 40,000.
A spokeswoman for Coleman’s office said the mayor had been out all afternoon today and had not seen the letter.
The head-scarf issue was raised in April when The Dispatch wrote about Ismahan Isse, a Somali-American and Muslim woman who left the Columbus police academy in March.
She told the newspaper that the main reason she left was because she wouldn’t be allowed to wear her head scarf, which she called a big part of her identity.
At the time, Napoleon Bell, executive director of the city’s Community Relations Commission, said she didn’t mention the head-scarf issue to members of his staff, but spoke of family obligations and her three children, and possibly wanting to pursue another career.
In August, the Ohio chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations filed an employment-discrimination complaint over the scarf issue. The group believes that the Ohio constitution and Ohio civil-rights laws allow people to express their faith even if they are government employees.
“If the job of the police is to serve the community, it makes sense that the officer would look like the community,” said Romin Iqbal, CAIR-Ohio’s staff attorney.
Other cities, such as Edmonton, Alberta, in Canada, allow head scarves for female Muslim officers, designing a hijab that snaps off if grabbed.