D.C. Assistant Police Chief Says She Was Once Told to ‘Have an Abortion or Be Fired’

D.C.’s assistant police chief says she was given a disturbing ultimatum when she was pregnant at the beginning of her career: either get an abortion or lose her job with Metropolitan Police Department.

“When I was 18-years-old as a police cadet, I was told I had to have an abortion or be fired from the MPD cadet program,” Chanel Dickerson said during a community meeting Tuesday. “Wow. My choice to have a baby was personal and it should’ve been mine alone and not for an employer ultimatum.”

According to FOX 5, Dickerson is one of 10 women who are suing the MPD for $100,000, alleging they faced discrimination at the hands of the department on the grounds of gender and race. The plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit are a mix of current and former female D.C. officers, all of whom are Black. The suit also alleges some of the women endured mistreatment and retilation after they cooperated with an internal investigation of one of their superiors.

Dickerson has been with the MPD since 1988 and is now the highest-ranking Black women within the department. She went on to highlight another instance in which another female officer was allegedly mistreated.

“Fast forward from that time, I think about how my female colleagues, when I was promoted to sergeant. And it was another sergeant who was promoted with me and she needed a shift that was conducive to taking care of her child as a single mother. Unfortunately, she had to do things no woman should ever have to do to care for her child.”

Shortly after Dickerson made the claims, D.C. officer Karen Arikpo came forward with her own allegations against MPD. Arikpo, who has worked in law enforcement for 24 years, said she was also told to terminate her pregnancy while she was a recruit in the police academy in 1997.

“I thought I could hide it. Just get through the academy and hide it,” she told FOX 5 about the pregnancy. Arikpo went on to say that during the recruitment process, a female sergeant told her class that any pregnancies would need to be aborted or they would not have a future with MPD.

“So later that day, I went and told my class sergeant that I was pregnant,” Arikpo recalled. “And she said I needed to have an abortion and she referred me to a doctor in D.C. to get it done.”

The claims were corroborated by a male officer and Dickerson, both of whom were in Arikpo’s recruitment class. Arikpo said the sergeant in question is no longer with department.

“It’s so unfair. And now I’ve never been able to have a kid. All these years, I’ve tried and I’ve never been able to have a baby,” she said about her decision to abort her pregnancy. “I did this for a job,” she says. “And then to want kids and can’t have them. How do you tell people that?”

Arikpo’s claims are not part of the class-action lawsuit. The MPD has declined to comment on the case.