In the wake of a fatal strip club shooting, city lawmakers have received a “legislative action plan” aimed at allowing the city to post cops at problem bars—then require the clubs’ owners to pay for the service.
The five-part plan, drawn up by Mayor John DeStefano, arrived on the desks of the Board of Aldermen at this past Thursday night’s meeting. The plan’s components all require action from the state before they can be enacted. Aldermen will vote on whether to add their support to the effort at the state level.
The plan comes in response to a number of violent incidents in and just outside New Haven nightclubs this year, including four murders. Most recently, six people were shot when a gunman sprayed bullets inside the Key Club Cabaret early on the morning of Oct. 26. One of the victims, 26-year-old fashion designer Erika “Hoppy” Robinson, died in the fusillade.
The mayor’s plan calls for creating a special services district for clubs, licensing bouncers, giving the police chief permanent power to weigh in on liquor permit applications, reviewing all liquor permit types, and allowing the chief to post police — at bar owners’ expense — at bars that have a history of problems.
Jason Cutler, owner of the Pulse nightclub downtown, was dismissive of the plan. (He is pictured in the above video confronting officials as they began trying to crack down on clubs like his in 2011.) Cutler argued the real problem at clubs is that the police department did away with its “hold down” system, in which bars would get the same officers for extra-duty assignments, rather than a rotating assortment of cops.
Part One
The legislative action plan has five parts.
First, it calls for the creation of a policing district for areas that have a large number of nightclubs. Rob Smuts, the city’s chief administrative officer, said the idea is to create a special services district for bars and clubs.
A special services district is an entity that can levy a tax on members, to help pay for expenses like litter control or planters. The city has several in town, including downtown and on Whalley Avenue, Chapel West, and Grand Avenue. Property owners vote to create the district and then vote to levy a tax on themselves.
“We want to tweak that idea to have it done not by property, but by business,” Smuts said. It would be based not on property location, but on business type. “All businesses with liquor permits would be able to vote to form a district and impose a fee on themselves.”
Smuts said that based on conversations with owners, the majority of clubs would be happy to do this. Their concern was that they don’t want “free-riders,” he said. They don’t want some people to pay and others see the benefit. That worry is addressed by the fact that special services districts don’t have to form with a unanimous vote. They can be imposed on properties if a majority approve them.
Smuts said the levied taxes could go toward a variety of things: training for club staff, extra “downtown ambassadors.” But the main reason the city is pursuing district-creation is to pay for police services, Smuts said. Individual extra-duty cops are not as effective as a policing detail assigned to cops, Smuts said. As it is, the responsible clubs put cops in front of their doors and the problem bars don’t. With a detail, the problem bars would have cops out front whether they ask for them or not.
Mayor-Elect Toni Harp said during the campaign that while she will support the special-services district, she questions the need. She said such districts already exist; and that in any case city officials can more effectively approach the problem by personally intervening with club owners. Police Chief Dean Esserman is currently meeting one-on-one with club owners to hammer out plans for increased public safety.
Cutler called the special-services proposal “ridiculous.”
“For the last three years, since they took away hold downs, we can’t even get the cops we hire to show up,” he said. Cops can make more doing regular overtime than they can working an extra-duty club job, he said. With so few cops in the department, and so much overtime, the cops don’t bother with extra-duty, Cutler said.
“There was a homicide coming out of his club before we got rid of the hold downs,” Smuts said of Cutler. “They’re not the real issue. … Going back to hold downs is not going to happen and will not improve things. It will add as many problems as it addresses.”
That said, Smuts said the city may be able to work out improvements with the police union, “to make officers a little more willing to work extra-duty assignments.”
The city and the police union have been in discussions about reviving a form of the hold-down system, which a former chief did away with out of concerns about corruption. Click here for a story about that.
Two
The second part of the plan is a proposal that would require the licensing of club security services. Bouncers and security guards at clubs would require training, background checks, and licensing.
Three
The third part would make permanent a pilot program that currently allows the police chief to tell the state liquor commission about problem bars that shouldn’t be allowed to renew their booze-selling permit. The program is set to expire at the end of the year.
Cutler called this “a waste of time and money.” He said it’s easy to get around the permitting process by getting a family member with a clean record to apply for the permit, or take ownership of the business. “His stupid system means nothing,” Cutler said.
Four
The fourth part of the proposal would deal with the work-around that Cutler mentioned. It would try to close loopholes like “hidden ownership.”
“That would be a good thing,” said Cutler.
The fourth part would work with the state to clarify what the different kinds of liquor permits are, Smuts said. “We want to have a broader conversation with the state” about “what is set down through legislation and regulation, how the permits are determined and what they allow.”
Five
The fifth part of the plan would allow the police chief to assign a cop to a club whenever it’s open, if that club has had at least three calls for service in the last 30 days or if it has been the scene for at least three documented charges in the past year of drugs, murder, assault, or gun crimes. The club owner would have to pay for the cop.
Cutler dismissed this idea, too: “If they just did what they were supposed to do and gave us our hold downs back, this stuff wouldn’t happen. Before these hold downs were taken away, we never had this trouble.”
“The hold down creates a different kind of problem,” DeStefano said. “Police get confused who they’re working for, the club or the chief of police. We’ve seen that when we’ve called police to testify. Don’t put people in the position of having to serve two masters.”
“Not having a hold down didn’t kill that woman the other night,” DeStefano said.
DeStefano said the fifth part of the plan is consistent with the way the city deals with, say, parades. If an event is going to draw a big crowd, “we’re going to assign cops and you’re going to pay for it.”
“The idea is what you’re doing is outside the bounds of normal behavior,” he said. Restaurants and bars have an incident now and then. That’s normal, and they shouldn’t have to pay extra for cops. “But if you’re turning yourself into a place that is becoming a consistent problem, you should have to pay for it.”
DeStefano said he hopes to see strong support in the city for the action plan, including testimony at the capitol by New Haveners who care about violence in clubs. He said it’s going to be hard to get anything through the state legislature.
“It’s important to, full throated, go out and support this,” he said. “We all need to feel the same sense of commitment and passion about this in March 2014 as we did in October when it happened.”