Officer Frederick Lee, who is Chinese Ameircan and has worked at NUPD since September 2005, says the first alleged incident of discrimination directed against him happened in 2006:
In 2006, Lee alleges that at multiple shift-change roll-calls, his supervisor would ask how he got his hair to stand up straight, or tell Lee that he reminded the supervisor of another Asian-American officer. (The other officer, Lee says, is Korean-American, and "looks nothing like me." The other officer no longer works at NUPD.)Lee said that after he first filed a complaint with Northwestern University's human resources office in April 2008, the six officers he named in the complaint stopped speaking to him. He was basically ostracized, but the discrimination apparently still didn't stop.
While on duty in a patrol car with another officer, the fellow officer remarked that an Asian-American driver was "driving while Asian." The fellow officer then turned to Lee and said "you can take that to [Human Resources] if you want."
The EEOC will notify NU and NUPD that a claim has been filed and they will have 90 days to mediate the dispute. Mediation would involve meetings between Lee, his lawyer, and representatives of NU and NUPD. An actual investigation typically follows if mediation is unsuccessful.
According to Lee's lawyer, his allegations are one part of an ongoing investigation into allegations of racial discrimination allegedly committed by members of Northwestern University Police Department.