Two months after asking Columbus’ mayor and police chief to reconsider the head-scarf ban for female Muslim police-officer candidates, a local lawyer is asking again for the city to re-evaluate its policy.
Frederick M. Gittes, who is also president of Protecting Ohio’s Employees, a nonprofit group that promotes workplace diversity and fair-employment practices, recently sent another letter to Mayor Michael B. Coleman, Police Chief Kim Jacobs and Mayor-elect Andrew J. Ginther. Gittes said neither Coleman nor Jacobs responded to his letter sent in October.
“I never heard back from you, never received an acknowledgment,” Gittes said on Wednesday, when he sent another letter. “I think this issue needs to be reconsidered and discussed.” The new letter calls the ban “unwise, unnecessary and counterproductive.”
Jacobs will not be responding to either letter because of an August complaint that the Ohio chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, filed with the Ohio Civil Rights Commission, said Sgt. Rich Weiner, Columbus police spokesman. That case remains open.
CAIR filed an employment-discrimination complaint over Columbus officials’ refusal to allow female officers to wear head scarves.
Gittes said city officials can change the policy while the matter is pending with the Civil Rights Commission.
“It doesn’t constitute an admission that they did anything wrong,” he said. And he said the new letter is not an attempt to sway the commission.
“Let’s talk,” Gittes said.
Coleman leaves office at the end of the month. Ginther’s spokesman, Jeff Ortega, had no comment on Wednesday.
Gittes sent the October letter on behalf of the group he represents and the Ohio Employment Lawyers Association, an organization that represents workers in labor, employment and civil-rights actions. Amy S. Glesius, the chairwoman of that group, also signed Wednesday’s letter.
In the October letter, the two groups said that statements made by Coleman and Jacobs in a Dispatch story that month “fail to recognize the importance of a diverse and representative police force and condone prejudice, however unintentionally.”
The story quoted Coleman as 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.”
Jacobs is quoted as saying: “I want whoever pulls up to the scene as being recognized as a Columbus police officer that doesn’t turn anyone off.”
The issue was raised in April when The Dispatch wrote about Ismahan Isse, a Somali-American who left the Columbus police academy in March. She told the paper the main reason was because she wouldn’t be allowed to wear her head scarf.
Then, Napoleon Bell, the executive director of the city’s Community Relations Commission, said Isse didn’t mention that problem to staff members but spoke of family obligations and her three children.