New Haven Independent

At its monthly meeting Monday night, the team signed on to the “Safe Streets” petition, which calls for a variety of measures to discourage reckless driving and has a stated goal of reducing traffic-related injuries by 90 percent.

Mark Abraham (at right in photo), who is heading up Safe Streets, said the petition has garnered over 1,600 signatures, including those of 30 public officials.

One of those 30 officials, East Rock Alderman Roland Lemar, reiterated his support for Safe Streets. He cautioned against getting caught up in a debate at this stage about the initiative’s most contested plank, an enforced citywide 25-mile an hour speed limit.

Even if keeping the speedometer at 25 citywide is inconceivable to 95 percent of people who see the petition, Lemar said, most still sign because they ultimately believe in what the initiative is trying to accomplish. “The things we disagree upon we can disagree upon later, but we can accomplish a lot under this banner,” he said.

Chief Takes on “Terrible” Traffic

After an area crime report by District Manager Lt. Rebecca Sweeney, which included three shootings this month and a number of pocketbook and GPS thefts from cars, the new police chief weighed in.

Currently only nine New Haven cops are assigned to traffic. These officers only work days; they are not a cohesive unit. Lewis (pictured) said he wants to have traffic cops on the job 16 rather than eight hours a day. He added that he will assign one lieutenant to exclusively focus on traffic.

New Haven’s dense streets make the roads both dangerous and hard to police. “Your traffic, frankly, is terrible,” Lewis said. He plans to overhaul traffic enforcement as part of a larger mission to rewrite much of the department’s policies and procedures.

He said he wants to set up targeted enforcement, in which one officer with a radar gun sits on an intersection. That officer calls in the plates of violators to a team of officers waiting down the road, who then pull the speeders over and issue tickets.

The city doesn’t get any revenue from issuing speeding tickets; the checks go to the state. The upside of that, Lewis said, is that no one can blame police officers for issuing speeding tickets just to raise funds.

Traffic sting operations are also a possibility — sending someone acting as a pedestrian to step out into traffic and see who stops. Again, an officer on the scene would call in violators to colleagues down the street.

Lewis said he also has no qualms about setting up sting operations to target drug dealers and other criminals. In the past he’s run prostitution stings in which he bought newspaper ads to print the names of perpetrators. “I’m trying to discourage behavior that destroys neighborhoods,” he said. “Some people think that’s excessive. I think it’s aggressive.”

The chief defended his use, at a previous neighborhood meeting in Dixwell, of the word “aggressive” to describe his approach to policing.

“In the two weeks before I got here, there were 18 people shot in 15 days. When you have that many people shot in the community, I don’t think it should be offensive to say the police department is going to be more aggressive in stopping the shootings,” he said.

“We don’t violate constitutional rights, we don’t use excessive force, and I’ll hold [officers] accountable if they do,” he said. “But I don’t want them to come to be so afraid of doing what you’re paying them to do that they fall back and get into a routine of not doing very much.”

Lewis acknowledged that his plan to beef up the traffic force will mean cutting back in other areas. It’s a balancing act, he said.

Quality Control

East Rock residents had some questions for their new chief. Ben Berkowitz (at right in photo, with neighbor Pete Stein) wanted to know why an operator of the non-emergency police line doesn’t know a basic piece of traffic law, that bikes are supposed to ride on the road, and that it’s illegal for them to be on the sidewalk. When Berkowitz tried to call in a traffic complaint, the operator told him bikers shouldn’t be riding in the street in the first place. (Click here for another example.)

Lewis explained that non-emergency operators are not sent to the police academy, so they are not as familiar with the law. He suggested bringing the complaint to the district manager if it is not adequately addressed by the operator.

He also said he will set up an inspection bureau to pull calls at random, and review the case from start to finish. Detailed reports will target procedural problems and direct content for operator training sessions.

Abraham asked about the attitude of drivers on the public payroll — from cops to CT Transit drivers to city officials — who speed and otherwise endanger others with unsafe driving practices. Lewis said citizens should report bad driving, and if he sees officers with a pattern of complaints, he will pursue disciplinary action.

Data-Driven Policing

Lewis emphasized bringing data-driven problem-solving to the department. Some residents expressed concerns that crime is rarely reported by citizens who witness it, whether out of fear or resignation that nothing will be done .

Berkowitz helped create a start-up website last fall that he thinks can help. Residents can go to seeclickfix.com and use a map-based application to report non-emergency public issues, from potholes to drug dealing to traffic violations.

Unlike with City Hall’s Web 311, users of SeeClickFix can see the posts of other users and comment on them, which allows people to rally around a given issue.

Berkowitz said Camden, N.J., has had success using this kind of system to provide anonymous reports to the police. “People know a drug-dealing house, but are very afraid to report it,” he said. With a public but anonymous reporting site up and running, officers can see where a number of complaints come in, and know to take that problem seriously.