The cab driver spent the night in central booking, and was eventually charged with third-degree assault. Three weeks later, NYPD officers walked into the mosque while Ahmed was on another volunteer shift and put him in handcuffs. Then the officers left and, as far as Ahmed knew, their argument was over.īut that afternoon, Moseley-Jones filed a police report against the taxi driver claiming that another congregant had reported that Ahmed had “grabbed” his arm and “shoved him out of the mosque” as the man was attempting to go inside to pray, police records show. “I said, ‘That’s not my rules, we’re following the city policy,” Ahmed recalled in an interview with THE CITY. That officer, Natasha Moseley-Jones, eventually got into the space on the first floor, but confronted Ahmed afterwards about why he hadn’t let her in, according to the suit. Concerned about the number of people on the first floor, Ahmed allowed one NYPD Deputy Inspector to enter, but then closed the door and attempted to redirect the other officer and other congregants to a second floor prayer room, according to the civil complaint filed by Ahmed in the federal Southern District of New York court last Tuesday.
That day, a few community members attempted to enter the mosque’s first floor alongside two NYPD officers who were there to make an announcement, security footage shows. The NYPD declined to comment on the incident, citing pending litigation.Īhmed’s ordeal began one day last June while he was serving as a volunteer at the Makki Masjid in Midwood, directing congregants coming in for Friday afternoon prayers to different parts of the facility to avoid overcrowding and comply with COVID social distancing rules. Hanif praised the mosque’s decision to sever its relationship with the NYPD, calling it “a really powerful testament to the kind of future we need to be calling for in New York City, one that is calling out surveillance and also calling out police violence.” “What this instance with Makki Masjid shows us is that the community had Ahmed’s back, and has Ahmed’s back,” said Shahana Hanif, a Brooklyn city council member who has publicly taken the NYPD to task for downplaying its surveillance of Muslim New Yorkers and who is the first ever Muslim woman elected to the Council.
The arrest - from a community affairs officer who is still working at the 70 Precinct and who’d been previously disciplined on two separate occasions for issues related to charges or summonses she’d brought or processed - prompted Makki Masjid, a faith community in Brooklyn’s Little Pakistan that has been surveilled by the NYPD since the department launched its post-9/11 Muslim spying program, to publicly cut ties with the NYPD and bar uniformed officers from entering the mosque, as Documented previously reported. “I hope so we can get justice from the court. I don’t think I can grow my kids in this country,” Ahmed said in an interview with THE CITY. “I don’t think I can live this country this is happening.
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Less than three months after his arrest in June of 2021, Brooklyn prosecutors dropped the case for lack of evidence, and now the 41- year-old, whose taxi license was suspended while he was facing charges, is suing the NYPD in federal court and demanding unspecified compensation and punitive damages for the upheaval his arrest caused him and his family. Ishtiaq Ahmed, a Pakistani-American taxi driver from Brooklyn, says his license was suspended and his livelihood interrupted after police framed him for an assault that never happened and arrested him inside of his mosque to get back at him for enforcing social distancing guidelines there This piece was published in a partnership between Documented and THE CITY.
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