An assistant police chief hired to help lead the law enforcement agency at New York City's public hospitals abruptly resigned from his new post on Wednesday after reporters inquired about misconduct allegations against him while he was a police chief in Michigan.
The assistant chief, Jamiel Altaheri, had been hired to oversee special officers that patrol New York City Health and Hospitals, the largest municipal health care system in the United States. Mr. Altaheri and the city confirmed he had stepped down on Wednesday, a day after starting at Jacobi Hospital in the Bronx.
A spokesman for Mayor Zohran Mamdani said that no one from the mayor's office or transition team had a role in hiring Mr. Altaheri, a 20-year veteran of the New York Police Department who left in 2024 to become the police chief of Hamtramck, Mich.
Mr. Altaheri said officials at Health and Hospitals asked him about two issues on Tuesday and Wednesday. The first was his current employment as an executive at a construction company that works with hospitals. The other concern, he said, was a report by the city of Hamtramck that detailed allegations of misconduct, including driving a city truck after drinking.
The New York Times asked officials at Health and Hospitals on Wednesday morning about the report. Mr.Altaheri said he was approached by agency officials around noon regarding the inquiries, and that he resigned from the position two hours later.
Mr. Altaheri said he was never charged with any crimes and has denied wrongdoing.
"Of course they knew about the investigation" in Hamtramck, Mr. Altaheri said by phone on Wednesday. "You can Google my name and it all comes up. Obviously everything had been disclosed during the entire application process."
"I got annoyed when they asked me about it," he added. "And I said, you know what, maybe that's a sign."
It was unclear on Wednesday how Mr. Altaheri got the New York hospitals job. But he has strong ties to New York, where he began his career as a police officer in 2004 and co-founded the Muslim Officers Society. He rose to the rank of deputy inspector overseeing the Office of Equity and Inclusion. During his tenure in the Police Department, one complaint of misconduct was made against him; it was found to be unsubstantiated.
Mr. Altaheri said that, while he was commanding officer of the 115th Precinct in Queens, he crossed paths with Mr. Mamdani, who was then a state assemblyman in the borough. Last November, about a month after he resigned as chief of the Hamtramck Police Department, Mr. Altaheri wrote on Facebook that he "would be proud to serve the City of New York again under the Mamdani administration if given the opportunity."
Mr. Altaheri was hired in February 2024 to run the police department in Hamtramck, a suburb of Detroit with a population of about 28,000.
The Hamtramck City Council voted to make him chief, choosing him from three candidates as part of an effort to diversify a department that was largely made up of white officers who patrolled a city with a large Arab American population, according to the Detroit Free Press. Mr. Altaheri told an interviewer in 2021 that he immigrated to New York from Yemen at age 3.
But a year into the job, he was accused of misconduct that ranged from showing up to work smelling of alcohol and repeatedly driving a city-issued truck after drinking to pressuring police officers to write a report accusing the mother of his 2-year-old son of using drugs. On one occasion, he gave a loaded gun to a civilian volunteer and told her to point it at someone's head; he later said he was joking. A law firm hired by the city conducted an investigation and said it had substantiated the accusations.
On Oct. 14, the City Council approved an agreement giving Mr. Altaheri a severance package equal to five months of his salary.
Amir Makled, a lawyer who represented him in Hamtramck, said on Wednesday that the accusations against his client "were never substantiated by a court finding" and that no criminal charges were ever brought.