Muslim NYers Choked, Brushed Off By NYPD Cops, Complaints Say

NEW YORK — Three new police misconduct complaints accuse NYPD officers of choking one Muslim New Yorker so hard her neck was partially broken and failing to investigate assaults on two others.

The cases reflect the Police Department's pattern of mistreating Muslims that cops purport to protect, said Ahmed Mohamed, a lawyer with the Council on American-Islamic Relations who filed the complaints this week with the Civilian Complaint Review Board.

"It is extremely important that we have a police force that respects the Muslim community, that treats them like every other citizen, and that does not see them as a danger in the streets," Mohamed said at a Thursday news conference outside NYPD headquarters in Lower Manhattan.

Asked about the allegations Thursday, Chief of Detectives Dermot Shea did not comment on them in detail but said the NYPD has the nation's largest hate crimes task force.

"I’m proud of the work that they do day in and day out," Shea said at a news conference.

The CCRB said it will thoroughly and impartially investigate any complaint it receives alleging excessive force, abuse of authority, discourtesy or offensive language by a uniformed NYPD cop.

The complaints were brought on behalf of Rayhanah Alhanafi, who says she was violently arrested during a traffic stop in Harlem; 16-year-old Abrar Chowdhury, whose family says police left them in the dark after he was attacked; and Fatoumata Camara, who allegedly had to investigate her own hate-fueled assault after cops cut their probe short.

Alhanafi was preparing to make a left turn at West 145th Street on the night of July 12, 2019, when she was pulled over for having a broken tail light, she said. The cops also accused her of having forged license plates and said she would be arrested, according to her complaint.

Alhanafi agreed, but asked at least three times to have a female officer search her because it's against her religious beliefs for men she does not know to touch her, the complaint says.

When she stepped back from the three male cops, they threw her to the ground and one of them put his knee on her back and his hands on her throat, she alleges. Alhanafi shouted that she was in pain and said "I can't breathe," but the cops didn't stop until bystanders filming the incident started yelling at them, the complaint says.

Alhanafi said she begged for medical attention inside the police precinct but did not get any, as the cop who choked her claimed it would "slow up his paperwork process." She learned two days after her arrest that she had a hairline neck fracture and had to wear a neck brace for two weeks, she said.

The ordeal shook Alhanafi — she said she still suffers from neck and back pain and struggles with suicidal thoughts.

"I'm still very depressed," she said. "... It's just like, when will this stop? You just can't keep getting away with that. You don't treat people like that."

Camara had to do some police work of her own after cops stopped investigating a bigoted attack on her in The Bronx, according to her complaint.

Roughly a dozen teenagers started taunting Camara aboard a Bx35 bus on May 10 by throwing sunflower seeds at her, calling her a profane racist insult and mocking her hijab as a "stupid headrag," her complaint says.

Camara mostly ignored them and refused to retaliate, but one of the teens knocked her in the back of the head when she got off the bus before others joined in, according to the filing. Her nose was broken and her purse containing her passport and other valuable documents was stolen, the complaint says.

Cops at the 42nd Precinct closed the case after determining that Camara could not pick out her attackers from a set of photos the day after the assault, according to the complaint.

Camara tracked down two videos of the incident by canvassing nearby businesses and found a witness to help identify the attackers, the complaint says. But no arrests have been made in the three months since she was assaulted, the filing alleges.

Camara "was forced to investigate her own hate crime, thereby multiplying the emotional distress of her attack as she was forced to repeatedly retraumatize herself," the complaint reads.

Cops in Queens's 102nd Precinct similarly dismissed Abrar Chowdhury and his family after the teen was "sucker punched" on June 14 this year, according to the complaint his dad brought Thursday.

A beef with another teen led to an altercation at Abrar's home that ended with him and his brother chasing the other kid into a phone store about two blocks away, the complaint says. The pair went across the street to rejoin their father to head back home, according to the filing.

But the other teen had called a 6-foot-tall man who pulled up on a motorcycle and slugged Abrar out of the blue, the complaint says. The kid suffered a facial fracture and had a surgery that put four plates in his face, according to Mohamed.

The detective investigating the case essentially gave up after Abrar and his brother could not pick out the attacker from at least 50 mugshots, the complaint alleges. The family is so afraid of another attack that they plan to move to Brooklyn, the filing says.

"When he couldn't ID the adult assailant, the NYPD ghosted him," Mohamed said. "It was like he didn't exist anymore."

The trio of allegations come on the heels of an NYPD inspector general's report showing that the Police Department substantiated none of the nearly 2,500 complaints about biased policing that it received over about four years.

The new complaints add to the pile of evidence that cops are failing to protect Muslim New Yorkers and deepening the divide between them and the police, community leaders said.

"There are bad apples within the NYPD that are making the NYPD be a villain in our communities," said Debbie Almontaser, a board member for the Yemeni American Merchants Association.