EINO SIERPE PHOTOS
Cops throwing unarmed protester Nate Blair to ground at protest last year; he got a concussion.
This time, Chris Desir and Wally Hilke said, they hope New Haven will get it right.
Desir and Hilke, third-year Yale law students and members of a local police accountability coalition, have been researching how other cities succeed or fail with civilian review boards (CRBs) that look into citizen complaints of cop misconduct. They concluded that the ones that succeed — in New York, Newark, Chicago, Berkeley— have paid staffs and subpoena power.
Now their group has drawn up a proposed ordinance to create that kind of CRB in New Haven. They’ve organized a community meeting Thursday in New Haven (6 p.m. at the United Church on the Green) as part of a campaign to build public support for the proposal. They made their case earlier on Thursday during an appearance on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
New Haven has been trying to get right with CRBs since 2001, when then-Mayor John DeStefano created one that became seen as a “paper tiger,” as advocates saw it. In 2013 city voters decided in a charter revision election to require that New Haven create a new version of the CRB with teeth. Yet the same politicians on the Board of Alders who got that revision passed have repeatedly failed to follow up and create that new CRB. Part of the delay has centered on whether the new CRB can legally have subpoena power to require cops and witnesses to testify. Alders last year were convinced the CRB couldn’t have subpoena power under state law; advocates argued that without subpoena power, the CRB would not succeed. The police union argued that subpoena power would violate its contract with the city (which is currently expired with a new contract under negotiation).
Read about those developments here and here.
A new group of alders plans to revive the proposal this year. Desir’s and Hilke’s group has drafted a proposed ordinance to create the “Malik Jones All Civilian Review Board.” (An East Haven cop chased Malik Jones, the son of activist Emma Jones, into New Haven at high speed in 1997 then shot him to death in a Fair Haven lot.)
The new citizens’ proposal would address the subpoena question by creating a “civil review” committee of the Board of Alders, with the alder chair serving as a non-voting member of the CRB. In that capacity the alder would be able to bring subpoena power to the body. Under the city charter, alder committee chairs have subpoena power. An alternative version would have the Board of Alders president or the chair of an already existing committee, who also have subpoena power, lend that authority to the panel.
Click here to read the full proposed ordinance.
The proposal review panel would consist of 13 voting members, 10 of them recommended by citizen groups in the 10 policing districts, all nominated by the mayor and approved by the Board of Alders. The CRB would have a full-time director and administrative staffer along with two investigators; the ordinance would set the budget at 1.5 percent of the police department’s budget, or in the neighborhood of $600,000.
That may be a heavy lift in a tough fiscal year, with a tax increase expected this coming fiscal year along with cuts throughout city government in the wake of state funding cuts.
But no city has succeeded with a truly independent and effective CRB without paying for it, Desir and Hilke argued. “You can’t have an effective CRB without a budget,” Desir said.
Their ordinance also departs from last year’s alder-proposed version by making the CRB an independent agency rather than existing under the aegis of the city corporation counsel office.
Desir called it a conflict of interest to embed the CRB in the city’s legal office: “This is the same group of lawyers that is supposed to defend the city against excessive force complaints.”
The proposed ordinance calls for creating a discipline “matrix” that would guide the police chief in deciding what punishment to give officers found to have abused the rights of citizens.
Click on the above audio file or the Facebook Live video to hear the full interview with Chris Desir and Wally Hilke.