A Michigan cop who alleged discrimination at the police station after a genetic test showed he was part black will receive a $65,000 settlement.
As part of the settlement terms, Cleon Brown, who filed the lawsuit against several Hastings city and police employees last year, will continue receiving his salary and benefits through October 31, but will be considered on administrative leave, MLive.com reported.
After that time, he cannot seek future employment in the city of Hastings and therefore plans to sell his home and relocate, his attorney Karie Boylan said, according to CNN.
The entire situation stems back to 2016, when Brown, who is white, decided to take a DNA test from Ancestry.com after his daughter was diagnosed with an illness typically found in African-Americans, The New York Times reported.
The results determined he is 18 percent sub-Saharan African and, when he revealed this to his colleagues at the police department, he claims he was ridiculed and subjected to ongoing taunts.
During the Christmas season, a member of the force allegedly put a black Santa Claus figurine with "18%" written on the beard in Brown's stocking, according to MLive.com.
Brown also claims that other officers would whisper "Black Lives Matters" and a police chief went as far as to call him "Kunta," apparently a reference to Kunta Kinte, a character in Alex Haley's novel "Roots: The Saga of an American Family."
Brown says that the mayor at the time, Frank Campbell, was part of the taunts and passed off racially charged remarks as a joke, The New York Times reported.
Brown said he was a victim of intentional infliction of emotional distress, and he alleged state and federal civil-rights violations and violation of the state's Whistleblowers' Protection Act, MLive noted.
The city, however, said Brown had sparked the banter by joking about the test results himself.
It further claimed that the information on race provided by Ancestry.com was not adequate and therefore Brown was not of a protected class.
"If plaintiff is allowed to be included as the member of a protected class because of the self-reported results of a commercial ancestry test, then the courts will be in the business of 'certifying bloodlines and races,'" said the city's attorney, Michael Bogren, according to MLive.
"Ancestry.com's website also states that the test results do not definitively reveal where a person's ancestors actually originated; only that there are shared characteristics in genes, which might or might not indicate a person's ancestors are actually from that geographic area."
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