Ramapo Police under fire for ‘insensitive’ booking of Hasidic woman
The Second Safest City blog sometimes recognizes that Clarkstown Police aren’t all that bad, and sometimes do have sensible policies (even if we bury that between criticism). Today’s case involves a police officer from the nearby Ramapo Police, who was accused of being ‘insensitive’ for requring a Hasidic woman, charged with first-degree welfare fraud, to remove her wig for her mug shot. Clarkstown Police Chief Peter Noonan said he would expect that his officers would have done the same thing. “The objective of the photograph is to identify the person,” Noonan said in an interview with the Journal News. “You want to know what the person looks like with or without the wig.” And the authors of this blog agree.
The Journal News article goes out of its way to fail to describe the nature of the woman’s charges, or how prevalent such charges are in the area, or even what is being done to combat welfare fraud, in a likely effort to avoid also being ‘insensitive’ to the needs of the Hasidics. We have no such qualms and will keep this story and more updated as it happens.
Tags: controversy, hasidics, insensitive, mug shot, orthodox jews, ramapo, religion, welfare fraud, wig
June 28th, 2008 at 9:09 pm
It’s nice to know that you can be so objective.