NYPD detective says she faced ‘unbearable’ discrimination as a black single mom: suit
An NYPD detective faced daily acts of sexism and racism, including being called “a savage’’ — and was bizarrely taunted with the color green because she got into a dispute with an Irish higher-up, a lawsuit says.
“I wanted to be a detective for so long, and now being a detective makes me feel like I should have just left the job,’’ 16-year department veteran and plaintiff cop Annaruth Legare recently told The Post.
The harassment started about a year ago, when the 38-year-old single mom asked for an accommodation to drop off her two boys, ages 10 and 14, at school in the morning, according to her lawsuit filed Thursday.
Legare was soon barraged by threats, racist images and comments that stretched across two precincts, court papers say.
The detective says in her suit that she worked in the 123rd Precinct on Staten Island for nearly a decade and a half as a regular cop and enjoyed it.
But when she started training for detective there in 2023, she suddenly faced a whole new set of colleagues — and started being treated in a way that was different than her first 15 years with the NYPD.
For example, after challenging a fellow trainee over him wanting to take shortcuts in a kidnapping investigation, he called her “a savage and an animal,” her lawsuit says.
Then after she made detective in October 2023, she was repeatedly forced to work the early morning detail, despite having been previously given an accommodation to take her kids to school, the suit says.
Legare, the only black detective in the precinct, was forced into the detail because of her race, her suit says, noting other mom detectives got exemptions.
“I took this job to help people and help others, not to get on the job and be mistreated and discriminated against,” she told The Post.
In another incident, when her son had an emergency at school, Legare’s supervising sergeant told her she still needed to help out with another detective’s arrest and that she couldn’t leave till the end of the day, her suit says.
Legare tried to file a complaint and reached out to her union delegate, but that just kicked off what became a daily deluge of racist and sexist torment toward her, she said.
Around the office, her new co-workers began wearing green — in solidarity with the Irish-American sergeant, her suit says.
When a person made a horrifically racist phone call to the department about inserting metal rods into black women, the sergeant laughed, court papers claim.
“That’s the Tottenville I know,” the sergeant said, according to the lawsuit.
The next day, a racist image depicting a New York Knicks player was hung up in the precinct, the suit says.
The “constant coordinated harassment” against Legare only intensified, including with all-green thumbtacks, green folders and green lights being placed around the office, clovers put on her desk and someone changing the color of her LED backlit keyboard to green every day, court documents say.
It continued even when she was transferred to Staten Island’s 122nd Precinct, she told The Post.
Someone there tried to change her keyboard color to green, “but they couldn’t figure it out,” Legare said.
Legare decided to take a week of leave “because seven months of harassment just got to be too much,” but when she returned to work June 26, she only lasted a day before taking leave again, she said.
She ended up hospitalized for over a week after a psychiatric break last month over the torture and remains on leave, her suit says.
She hasn’t worked since.
“The NYPD has consistently ignored complaints from officers who report discrimination, enabling a retaliatory culture to thrive unchecked,” her lawyer, John Scola, told The Post.
Both the city and the NYPD declined to comment on pending litigation, but the Police Department added that the agency “does not tolerate discrimination or sexual harassment.”
