Tom Foley Wednesday afternoon dropped in on the city that prevented him from winning his last election and invited his opponent’s favorite police chief to offer advice on tackling urban crime — advice that sounded at times quite different from the themes Foley sounded on the campaign trail.
The occasion was the latest public event hosted by a “nonpartisan think tank” Republican Foley set up since losing the 2010 gubernatorial election to Democrat Dannel P. Malloy. The think tank—Connecticut Policy Institute—hosted a forum on “Strategies for Urban Crime Prevention in Connecticut” at the new downtown campus of Gateway Community College. The keynote speaker was New Haven Police Chief Dean Esserman, whom Malloy hired to run Stamford’s police department when Malloy ran that city, and whom Malloy more recently as governor enlisted to help devise a statewide urban anti-gang-violence initiative.
Foley has started running against Malloy again, for the 2014 gubernatorial election. The think tank he set up is widely seen as a forum to advance his candidacy; it is hosting a series of events in cities, where Foley lost the last election to Malloy. (Especially in New Haven, which gave him his largest margin of victory.) Foley insisted Wednesday that the think tank is separate from his candidacy, a “nonpartisan” entity seeking solutions to state problems.
“I don’t have my political hat on today,” Foley said before the event began.
Wednesday’s lunch event drew 35 people into Gateway’s first-floor Community Room; Malloy appeared in the same room last August when hundreds crammed inside to celebrate his administration’s support for building the new downtown campus.
Esserman spoke for an hour Wednesday about how community policing has gradually brought a new approach to urban crime-fighting since the mid-20th century. It is moving from a warlike to a communal relationship-building approach, he said.
“We had a president who said, ‘Let’s have a war on crime.’ Easy words. Dangerous idea. The American police became militarized,” Esserman said. “We told them to go to war against their own citizens. … We got faster cars and faster radios and bigger guns. … We became strangers in the community. … People didn’t know who we were.”
Community policing, based in part on the “broken windows” theory that small problems turn into bigger problems if left unattended, developed in cities like New Haven in the 1990s. It cut crime dramatically and changed the way police operated: It emphasized neighborhood walking-beat cops who got to know people, solving problems before they become worse rather than trying to arrest as many people as possible for small infractions, working intensively with other law-enforcement agencies and especially with neighbors, social workers, and community leaders. Esserman helped launch New Haven’s experiment as an assistant chief in the early 1990s. He left to run the Stamford and Providence departments. He returned to New Haven in 2011 after violence shot back up amid a decline in community policing. He has aggressively reinstituted a community policing program, from renewed walking beats to partnerships with other agencies to a new federally backed anti-gang initiative called Project Longevity, which the Malloy administration is spreading to other Connecticut cities. Seventy to 80 people from all over New Haven’s civic landscape now cram the weekly CompStat crime data-sharing and problem-solving meeting at police headquarters.
Esserman told the audience Wednesday afternoon how violent crime has dropped dramatically in New Haven since community policing returned. And police are solving more crimes. He told the story of 32 Lilac St. That’s the lot in Newhallville where Yale architecture students were building a new home as part of an annual project. Yale halted the project after a kid mugged and harmed an 83-year-old architecture professor there. A neighbor called a cop she knew from the neighborhood, Robert Hayden, while he was on vacation in Hawaii. She told him the attacker’s nickname. Hayden knew the kid and the family. He called the mother and arranged for the kid to be brought in for arrest.
That incident showed the trust and results that can develop through community policing, Esserman said.
He also spoke of how the police department hired college students to run a much-expanded summer camp in New Haven this year. That’s community policing, too, he said.
After his talk, Esserman took questions from the audience. Fair Haven Heights property manager Sandy Martin (pictured) spoke of how much conditions have improved in her area since familiar walking-beat cops arrived and since top neighborhood cop Sgt. Vincent Anastasio got to know everyone well. He gave her and many others his cell phone number. She calls that number, not 911, when she needs help, and the help comes fast, she said.
Foley asked Esserman for advice for improving the judicial process. Esserman spoke of the need for “swift, certain” … and “short” — sentencing for crimes. The courts provide none of that now, he said. Cases linger too long in the system. And criminals stay locked up way too long — and all too often come out of jail hardened and ready to commit more crimes.
He was also asked about gun control. He said stricter gun laws would help cut crime, in his opinion. “I’ve got three kids,” he said. “They’ve got to go through hell to get a driver’s license. Why shouldn’t they go through hell to get a gun” and enable the police to have more needed information about gun-buyers in the process?
Asked after the event about Esserman’s talk, Foley called the chief “obviously an exceptional man providing exceptional leadership.” “He makes a lot of sense to me,” Foley said.
What about his critique of excessive tough-on-crime-style jail sentences? Foley, who ran partly on supporting the death penalty in 2010, replied that “if the long sentences aren’t working, I agree with him. They’re not being effective.” Asked about Esserman’s support of stricter rules for buying guns, Foley replied: “I think that’s where the country’s going.”
The pair exchanged a handshake and smalltalk before Esserman left Gateway to return to the beat. He invited Foley to a CompStat meeting. Foley said he’ll take him up on the offer.