Davidson County Sheriff Daron Hall says in a new court filing his department’s policy is to allow Muslim women to wear hijabs in arrest booking photos to protect their religious freedoms, which differs from Knox County’s policy.
The sheriff’s statement was written for a federal lawsuit from Layla Soliz, a Knoxville Muslim woman who is suing the Knox County Sheriff’s Office for publishing her photo without her hijab.
Soliz sued the Knox County Sheriff’s Office last year for at least $250,000 in damages, and wants the sheriff’s office to amend its policy so hijabi women no longer have to remove their head coverings.
“Removing religious headwear for a booking photo is not generally required in Davidson County, though it’s always required in Knox County. Neither of them is ever supposed to publish the photo, though,” Soliz’s attorney Daniel A. Horwitz told Knox News.
Layla Soliz was arrested on May 15 on charges of criminal trespass while participating in a pro-Palestinian demonstration on the University of Tennessee campus.
Layla Soliz is arrested by a University of Tennessee Police Department officer on May 15.
Hall said arrestees’ features and the shapes of their faces are obvious in photos even when they’re obscuring their hair, as many Muslim women do. The goal of a booking photos is to be able to visually identify a person, and that’s easily possible without removing the scarf, Hall says.
“Under Davidson County Sheriff’s Office policy, religious arrestees who wear religious headwear ‒ including religious arrestees who wear a hijab ‒ generally are not required to remove their religious headwear for booking photos,” he wrote in the filing.
A Davidson County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson said the filing was not specifically in support of Soliz, but rather a declaration of the department’s policy.
Hall said their policy has been in effect for over a decade. Religious garments are searched before the booking photo is taken.
“In my experience, accommodating religious arrestees’ sincerely held beliefs by permitting them to continue wearing their religious headwear for booking photographs furthers law enforcement interests by promoting goodwill between law enforcement and the members of the religious communities we serve. It also avoids antagonizing members of those communities unnecessarily,” Hall wrote.
In May, the Knox County Sheriff’s Office sent Knox News a copy of its policy, which included a section titled “Religious Head Coverings” that explicitly instructs jailers to respect “the dignity and religious rights of arrestees who wear religious head coverings” and instructs staff to take photographs of the person arrested with and without the head covering but to publicly release only the photograph with the head covering.
This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Davidson County sheriff in court filing: We allow hijabs in photos