Chaumtoli Huq, 42, says in the
suit filed late Tuesday in Manhattan Federal Court that she was waiting for her
husband and two young children outside a Times Square eatery when cops arrested
her for no reason.
BY DAREH GREGORIAN
A former top lawyer for Public
Advocate Letitia James isn’t exactly advocating for the NYPD’s policing
practices.
In a blistering lawsuit filed
late Tuesday in Manhattan Federal Court, Chaumtoli Huq, 42, says NYPD officers
used “unreasonable and wholly unprovoked force” when they arrested her without
cause while she was leaving a pro-Palestinian protest in July.
The bust was “characteristic of
a pattern and practice of the NYPD in aggressive overpolicing of people of
color and persons lawfully exercising their First Amendment rights,” the suit
says.
Huq, who says in her lawsuit
she’d taken a leave of absence as James’ general counsel to work on factory
conditions in her native Bangladesh a day before the arrest, says she believes
she was targeted because she’s a Muslim woman.
Huq was wearing a traditional
South Asian tunic while waiting for her husband and their 6- and 10-year-old
kids to come out from a bathroom stop at Ruby Tuesday's in Times Square when
she was told to leave by an officer, the suit says.
She said she explained she was
waiting for her family and then the officer “without any legal basis, grabbed
Ms. Huq, turned her and pushed her against the wall and placed her under
arrest.”
When she said she was in pain,
one of the officers, Ryan Lathrop, allegedly told her, “Shut your mouth.” When
he found out she had a different last name than her hubby, he told her “In
America, wives take the names of their husbands.”
She was held for nine hours
after the officers falsely claimed she had refused instructions to move and had
“flailed her arms and twisted her body” to make it hard for them to handcuff
her, the suit says.
She accepted an Adjournment in
Contemplation of Dismissal five days later, meaning the charges against her
will be dropped if she does not got rearrested within the next few months.
Her lawyer, Rebecca Heinegg,
said her client accepted the plea deal because her planned fellowship in
Bangladesh made it impossible for her to fight the charges over a protracted
period of time.
Huq’s suit blames the officers’
conduct on “city policies, practices and/or customs of failing to supervise,
train, instruct and discipline police officers and encouraging their
misconduct.” It also says the department has a “practice or custom of officers
lying under oath, falsely swearing out criminal complaints, or otherwise
falsifying or fabricating evidence.”
While the suit describes Huq as
being “on leave” from the Public Advocate’s office, a rep for James said she no
longer works there, and her last day of work was July 18 — the day before the
arrest.
James didn’t comment on the
suit, but has been a critic of the NYPD’s use of stop-and-frisk in minority
communities and a proponent of body cameras for NYPD officers — which could
have come in handy for this case.
Huq’s suit seeks unspecified
damages for her “physical, psychological and emotional injuries, mental
anguish, suffering, lost wages, humiliation and embarrassment” — and also
retraining for Midtown South cops.
A rep for the city Law
Department said, “We will review the lawsuit.”
Huq told the Daily News via
email from Bangladesh that she had gone to the rally not “as a lawyer, but as a
mom.”
MOHAMMED N. MUJUMDER VIA
FACEBOOKHuq says in her suit that an officer who arrested told her to
"shut your mouth," after she complained that she was in pain.
“I was hesitant to bring a
case. My job is to be behind the scenes, and help all New Yorkers,” she said,
but she realized “that I can use what happened to me to raise awareness about
overpolicing in communities of color. I want there to be a dialogue on policing
and community relations,” she said.
DNAinfo, which first reported
on Huq’s arrest, said she filed a complaint about the officers’ conduct with
the Civilian Complaint Review Board.
NY1 reported last month that
Lathrop is also under investigation by the NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau,
which is investigating an incident in which the cop allegedly confiscated the
phone of someone who was taping him and then roughed him up.
