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An NYPD worker claims she faced retaliation and discrimination after she begged to be reassigned after an alleged domestic violence attack, she claims in a fiery new lawsuit.
Fingerprint tech Santio Williams claimed the mistreatment began when she requested a move from NYPD headquarters at 1 Police Plaza to avoid any future interactions with her alleged abuser.
Her request was not only denied, but her police supervisors sent her to instead work at a department known for its abuse, harassment and micro-managing, her suit states.
When her sister died in October and Williams asked for bereavement leave along with a death certificate, her supervisor demanded she return with a funeral program showing a list of siblings “to prove that [Williams] is a family member,” her suit states, something that is not required by the department.
“It’s like a torture chamber,” Williams told The Post. “It’s a case of retaliation.”
The daily harassment has led to severe stress, anxiety and panic attacks so severe that first-responders were called at least twice, she claims in the lawsuit, which was filed in Manhattan Supreme Court in November.
The suit follows a similar legal action filed in October by a Staten Island detective who claimed she faced daily harassment and racism at her precinct after she asked for an accommodation as a single mother.
“The NYPD consistently disregards New York City law by retaliating against employees who request accommodations,” said attorney John Scola, who filed both of the recent suits.
“In a disturbing contradiction of its mission to prevent domestic violence, the department refused to provide a necessary accommodation to an employee seeking protection from a domestic abuser and then retaliated against her for seeking safety,” Scola told The Post.
A spokesperson for the NYPD told The Post that the department “does not tolerate discrimination in any form and is committed to respectful work environments for our diverse workforce,” and declined to comment further on pending litigation.
After Williams allegedly fled her physically abusive husband and moved into a domestic violence shelter last year, police leaders told her that there weren’t any other locations for fingerprint techs at the moment, she claimed.
But Williams had been working out-of-title as a police administrative aide — a higher-ranking civilian position — since a few months after she joined up in spring 2023, and could have been relocated easily as an aide, her suit claims,
“When I became homeless, I asked for the reasonable accommodation,” Williams recalled, “And [when]I was told I can’t get it, I argued: I said, why can’t I get it when I’m not even working as a fingerprint technician?
“That did not rub them the right way,” she said, and Williams soon received a letter denying her request.
On the same day, she was allegedly transferred back to the fingerprint division, forcing her to work back “in title,” Williams said.
“Why, for security reasons, I couldn’t be accommodated, out of [NYPD’s] duty of care to me, to transfer me away from this area?” she recalled.
Williams said when she was first hired at the NYPD in May 2023 — with a long work history from her longtime home of London with law enforcement, “trained in forgery, experienced in investigations and intelligence, behavioral profiling, and safeguarding,” her suit states.
She made the hiring team well aware of her childcare responsibilities for her two kids — ages 3 and 8 — and asked for a daytime tour, which the department gladly accommodated.
“I was even told that I was overqualified,” Williams said, and she recalled that she only took the lower-ranking job under the fingerprinting title because she was told there would be some retirements soon for higher positions she qualified for.
After a month, Williams was transferred to the Criminal Records Unit at 1 Police Plaza, where she began working as a PAA out-of-title with no pay increase, she told The Post. She had also passed her PAA civil service exam with high marks, according to her lawsuit.
For the next few months, she was commended for her work ethic, the suit claims.
Williams said her job was “a safe haven” after the alleged abuse at the hands of her husband, an American she met while on vacation in Jamaica. She moved to the city in 2019 with her husband as a sponsor, she claimed.
The abuse began as verbal — but then turned physical, Willaims claimed, and turned to superiors because she didn’t know what to do.
“We used to vent about it every day until things got really bad,” Williams recalled, then her supervisor told her: “No, you had to do something about it,” and gave her a pamphlet for a domestic violence shelter.
“He was so unpredictable. The only way I could imagine being safe was being away from him,” she claimed to The Post.
When her case worker told her she should try to work in a different zip code to make it harder for her husband to find her, that’s when she asked for an accommodation — requests for which are handled by a totally different team, she said.
But her denial and move back to the fingerprinting office, where she had worked previously for only a few weeks, was just the start of the retaliation, according to her claims.
The office was no longer a safe haven for her, and her supervisor didn’t just lack a receptive ear, but was determined to ostracize her entirely, Williams claimed.
“Everyone was very stiff-necked,” she told The Post, and said her new manager wouldn’t even face her when she had to speak.
Williams, whose duties meant she was rarely at her desk for most of the day, said the manager would just drop work on her desk and not inform her — leaving her in the dark — and would exclude her from office-wide emails about picture day or that everyone was supposed to wear red for some coordinated event, she said.
“Even on bring-your-child-to-work day, my request to bring my child was denied,” Williams said.
Williams said the harassment got more overt when her supervisor made onerous requests for medical documentation of any sick days or doctor appointments — a requirement not “set by the NYPD Medical Division or expected of any other employee,” the lawsuit states.
She even allegedly refused a COVID test result printed on letterheaded documents — which sent Williams over the edge.
“I had a severe panic attack — EMS was called,” she said. “It had just become so hostile… It was one thing after another.”
“I started to have headaches, stomach aches, I would lay in bed thinking about waking up the next morning to go to work,” Williams said. “It had become a nightmare…and it’s hard to hide that sort of feeling when you have two small kids.”
Twice her supervisor allegedly wrote her up for tardiness for being one minute late returning from a break, and another time in September, claiming that she never informed them of an instance where her lunch ran over, Williams said.
“I was furious because this is distorting facts,” Williams said, “like, this was not what happened.”
When Williams confronted her supervisor, she acknowledged Willams had told her about it, according to the claims.
“I said: you’re targeting me,” Williams said. “I said: this doesn’t seem right. This is harassment.”
Williams said she thinks it’s a case of “emotional management,” and said she hopes the new NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch can improve things.
“You have managers who they can’t manage with their emotions,” Williams said, “they don’t make the right decisions, and it’s a part of the chain of command.”
“When you have an emotional manager who just feels like: ‘I don’t like this person,’ so whatever they want to make their life a living hell, they will do.”