It's certainly fairly easy to establish whether or not something is a religious requirement. This is something that courts and tribunals have a lot of practice and have some fairly standardized requirements for. It's certainly not about how deeply one feels things. What "reasonable accommodation" is is a little different. Like there is no question that the Sikh turban is a religious requirement; whether that means that Sikh employees (for example) should be able to not wear a hard hat because of it is a different matter (I don't think they can).
As for a full face covering; I think you could make a reasonable argument that a person on the street being able to recognize a police officer on the street from her ID is an important part of the job. Even if that argument were accepted, I'm not sure it means that she couldn't be accommodated at all. Like surely there are police jobs that don't involve interacting with the public on the street. Maybe she could do one of those jobs. But I don't think you can make a reasonable argument that for an orthodox muslim it is personal preference over religious mandate or that the prohibition is not constructive discrimination.




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. Another court upheld a police department’s refusal of a police sergeant’s request to refuse to arrest any persons blocking access to abortion clinics, by holding that accommodating the request would be an undue hardship of potentially jeopardizing the “duty to uphold the law which has been passed by the people in order to protect society” and threatening the protection of “individuals inside abortion clinics from others’ interference with their legally protected rights.” Parrott v. District of Columbia, 1991 WL 126020 (D.D.C. 1991).
I need to seriously get out of this thread before I explode!

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