BLUE MOMS SUE
Cops: We lack places to pump breast milk
Even with new rules and a pending class-action lawsuit, the NYPD still doesn’t have adequate spaces for nursing mothers to express breast milk, rank-and-file cops said Tuesday.
“If the department tells you that they got rooms for nursing mothers, they’re lying,” one cop told the Daily News after five women officers filed a joint complaint against the NYPD for not providing them with clean spaces for them to pump. “The only actual room that I know of is at 1 Police Plaza, but there isn’t one in the 42nd Precinct, the 47th Precinct, the 77th Precinct, nowhere.”
A second officer — who patrols in lower Manhattan — said there are no spots for nursing mothers in her stationhouse either.
According to new rules hammered out last year and sent out in a department-wide bulletin, the NYPD said each precinct must provide “a private room or an office for employees to express breast milk.” The room should “provide an employee with the requisite privacy” and cannot be a bathroom.
The NYPD did not return a request for a list of nursing rooms in each precinct house.
“That policy is garbage,” said attorney Eric Sanders, who is representing the five NYPD working moms. “To this day women are being forced to strip half naked in the field when they need to pump milk. Are they trying to get their own officers killed?”
On Monday, Police Officers Simone Teagle, Theresa Mahon, Melissa Soto-Germosen, Vivian Ayende and Elizabeth Ortiz filed discrimination complaints against the department, claiming that they were forced to pump breast milk in cars or in bathrooms. As a result, several of the women suffered mastitis,a painful infection in clogged milk ducts.
Teagle filed a $5 million lawsuit against the NYPD in October, claiming that her superiors at the 113th Precinct stationhouse in Jamaica, Queens, refused to provide her and other nursing moms a clean spot — despite policy and mandates in state and federal law.
When she complained about her treatment, she was transferred, she claimed.
Federal law requires employers give their nursing employees adequate break time to pump breast milk for up to one year after their child’s birth and provide “a place, other than a bathroom, that is shielded from view and free from intrusion from coworkers and the public.”
Mahon claims her bosses at the 66th Precinct in Borough Park, Brooklyn, refused her a place express her milk and was forced to retreat to her car as she helped patrol the UN General Assembly.
The NYPD said it is “committed to providing its employees with appropriate accommodations to express breast milk privately, comfortably and in close proximity to work.”