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Desi policeman gets his due

Aseem Chhabra

As a child in New Delhi, William Nathan dreamed of joining either the US Marines or becoming a policeman. His father worked for the American embassy, where the young Nathan would see the Marines posted at various locations.

But after he saw the movie, In the Heat of the Night, which showed a black police officer triumphing over racist treatment, he dreamed of becoming a cop.

Four decades later, Nathan saw his dream come true in more ways than one. He had served the Marines and then joined the police force. But he was not just another police officer in Princeton, New Jersey -- he was also the first Indian American police officer in the state. And like Sydney Poitier, he was a victim of racist peers. But unlike in the movie, he retired from the police force, wanting to fight his battle in court.

This week, he had his own triumph: A jury of five men and four women awarded him $270,000 for emotional distress suffered all through the 23 years he was an American police officer.

The jury in New Jersey's Mercer County superior court agreed on three counts of Nathan's lawsuit -- that he suffered harassment based on his ethnic origin, that he received unfair performance evaluations and was discriminated against when he was passed over for a promotion to the sergeant level in 1996.

The jurors also heard that his colleagues wanted to know whether there were houses in India, to which Nathan's quick retort was that Indians lived on trees. He would be called 'Gandhi' or 'water boy' and was told that a bindi on an Indian woman's forehead would be a good target to shoot at.

Nathan, 48, retired from the police force in 1999, two years after filing the lawsuit against the borough, the police department and its chief, Thomas Michaud. But during the final months of the suit, Nathan dropped several other defendants he had earlier named in the suit -- including Princeton Mayor Marvin Reed, three former council members and a former borough administrator.

"Not only does it [the verdict] send a message to the borough of Princeton and the borough police department, who should have taken steps when complaints of discrimination were made," Nathan's attorney Brian Cige told reporters, "it sends a message to all the municipalities and police departments in the state."

But the state isn't giving in: an appeal has been filed by Steven Goodell, defence attorney for the police department, with a hearing scheduled for May 11.

While the nine-member jury ruled in Nathan's favour, they were unable to reach a unanimous decision on whether he should get a larger monetary award for punitive damages. Nathan said Cige may consider seeking punitive damages through another jury, at a later stage.

Nathan's family arrived in the United States in 1970 and he attended the undergraduate degree programme in criminal justice at the College of New Jersey in Trenton, NJ. He joined the US Marines for two years during the Vietnam war and received an honourable discharge.

The harassment, Nathan says, started pretty much after he joined the Princeton police force in 1976. "Indians hadn't established themselves in the United States at that time and people did not know who we were," he told rediff.com, adding that due to his dark skin he was often mistaken for an Iranian or a person of Spanish origin. "They would never connect me to being from India."

In the court, Cige said Nathan's complaints, that he was the butt of his colleagues' jokes, were never taken seriously by his superior officers. "There was a culture in the department that permitted this illegal discrimination," Cige said during his presentation before the jury.

Nathan said he was promoted to a detective in 1984. "But then there was a big uproar from other policemen, who were upset that the department had promoted an Indian as a detective, and so they made my life hell in the detective bureau," he told rediff.com

"I was assigned to a partner who wouldn't talk to me or ride with," he added. "Then I was taken off and put back in uniform after a year." A report published in The Trentonian said Nathan was demoted back to patrolman after receiving unfavourable reviews from senior officers in the police department.

During his final arguments in court, Goodell countered the allegations that racism played a role in the denial of promotion. "He was good enough to keep his job, but he wasn't good enough to get promoted," Goodell said. "The problem was not the fact that he was from India; the problem was based on the fact that he was a hard guy to get along with."

Why did Nathan stay with the department for 23 years? He admits he did not consider leaving the department. He also did not seek to join any other police force in New Jersey state.

"I had this thing that they couldn't defeat me," he said, adding that he stayed put to fight back. "If they hadn't created a hostile work environment, I would have probably quit and gone to a different career. But they made it so difficult for me that I stuck in there and I fought back. In hindsight, I think it was really a stupid thing to do."

Ironically, while Nathan claims that he was being mistreated by the Princeton police, other police departments in New Jersey often sought his assistance in dealing with issues that concerned the state's growing South Asian community.

He says that in the 1980s he held sensitivity and diversity classes for police departments in Middlesex county. The township of Edison -- with a large South Asian population and the famous Little India stores on Oak Tree Road -- is located in Middlesex county.

Occasionally he would also be called to provide translations for non-English-speaking South Asian immigrants and to assist in criminal cases that involved South Asians.

"The other police departments were more interested in educating themselves than my own police department, which is kind of sad," Nathan said.

Nathan lives with his wife and two sons in Lawrence, NJ. He has not decided what his next career move will be, now that the lawsuit is settled. It may have been his dream job when he was a child, but he does not think he would recommend a position in a police department to another Indian in the US.

"Seriously I don't want any other Indian to go through what I went through," he said. "Even though I have won my case, I don't think the police department culture is going to change overnight. Unless someone is brave enough to fight against these people, I don't think it is worth it."

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