Black NYC cop denied MTA policing job charges racial discrimination

An MTA police officer at a graduation ceremony. Photo via the MTA/Patrick Cashin

By David Brand

A Black NYPD officer denied a job with the MTA police is charging the transit agency with racist hiring practices in a complaint filed Tuesday.

Jonathan Kyle Carter, a 29-year-old cop from Long Island, told the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that the MTA rescinded his job offer after subjecting him to a polygraph test late last year. Carter said the agency uses the seemingly “race-neutral” exam “to suppress the hiring of African American (black) police officer candidates.”

“This racially motivated invidious discrimination is done to facilitate a covert policy and procedure by MTA that denies black candidates equal opportunity, among other reasons, in favor of white applicants with family already employed by the MTA, that is nepotism, at the expense of the constitutional rights of black candidates," Carter stated in his complaint.

In practice, the complaint continues, the MTA uses the polygraph exam “as a means to eliminate black applicants.”

The lawsuit isn’t the first time the MTA Police have been accused of racial discrimination.

Carter and his attorney, Peter Crusco, said the job denial is part of a pattern of bias by the transit agency, which paid Black and Latino transit cops $1.2 million to settle a lawsuit in 2015. That suit said 96 percent of the agency’s captains and other top officials were white.

Carter also said the MTA discriminated against him after he told the polygraph examiner that he has “white coat syndrome,” an informal term for anxiety that occurs in a clinical or medical setting. 

“That’s not a real condition,” the examiner responded, according to the complaint.

Crusco said Carter will determine whether he will sue the MTA after the EEOC concludes its investigation.

In a response Friday, the MTA said: “As a matter of policy, we don’t comment on personnel matters or matters of pending litigation.”