(Updated 5:41 p.m.) A long-awaited internal affairs report clears New Haven cops of any personal misbehavior in a raid on a private Yale party at a downtown nightclub, yet comes with extensive concerns about a systemic “training failure” that led to improper conduct.
It was one of two internal affairs reports released Thursday afternoon. (Click here to read about the other one.)
The first report, about an Oct. 2 police raid at Club Elevate, finds that no officers or top cops committed any acts that require discipline.
The raid took place as part of “Operation Nightlife,” a crackdown on misbehavior at downtown clubs. Yale students had rented Club Elevate for a private party.
The report also finds that cops shouldn’t have prevented 450 detained students from using cell phones. But it wasn’t their fault, the report finds. It was a “training failure.”
The report comes with a memo from Chief Administrative Officer Rob Smuts that details five “concerns” that the department needs to address as a result of the raid.
Read the 49-page report here.
Read Smuts’ memo here.
Yale Alderman Mike Jones noted that the reports’ release comes on the anniversary of the Rodney King beating. “The 20th anniversary of Rodney King’s beating at the hands of the LAPD serves as a timely reminder that police misconduct captured on video can inspire social movements and cause the public to demand meaningful reforms,” Jones wrote in an email. “While the Rodney King beating and the Elevate raid are obviously very different, I am pleased to see that Chief Administrative Officer Rob Smuts’ recommendations include establishing policies and programs to protect citizens’ rights to conduct inverse surveillance and share their stories about their interactions with police officers.”
Read about the original Elevate raid here and about student accounts of police misconduct here.
The report clears officers of allegations of verbal abuse or using excessive force. It found that Lt. Thaddeus Reddish, who used his Taser on a Yale student, needed to because the student (a football player) was resisting arrest and physically attacking him.
Attendees at the party also accused the police of unlawful detention; some 450 people were held in the room. The internal affairs report concludes that the cops were acting properly in detaining the crowd because they and the liquor control agents with them needed a head count to see if fire codes were violated, and also because of a need to inspect “bar operations.”
The report does conclude that police should not have ordered students to put away their cell phones. Some students were calling for help; at least one person shot a video. (Watch it at the top of this story.)
However, the report also concludes that officers didn’t know that it was improper to make such an order, because the department had never adequately schooled them on the First Amendment. The report’s conclusion: this was a “training failure.”
A key figure in the Oct. 2 raid — Assistant Chief Ariel Melendez, who ordered SWAT officers into the club — has since retired from the force amid concerns about his actions not just that night, but in the other case in which he ordered a citizen arrested for using a camera to video-record a police action on the same downtown street.
Full Responsibility
The Elevate raid exemplified “poor planning, poor decision making, and poor leadership,” said Chief Frank Limon.
In his comments at a brief afternoon press conference on the third floor of the police headquarters at 1 Union Ave., Limon began by placing the raid in the context of Operation Nightlife. That crackdown on the club district was prompted by a shoot-out on Crown Street between cops and club-goers, Limon said. That was just part of the problems in the club district, including rowdiness, overcrowding, noise complaints, underage drinking, Limon said.
Of more than a hundred successful investigations as part of Operation Nightlife, Elevate was one problematic one, he said.
“Elevate is not the norm,” Limon said. “Elevate is a aberration.”
Asked what specifically was problematic about the Elevate raid, Limon said that police didn’t understand that the facility is actually two separate clubs in one. Police had “no idea” how many people were in there and lost control, he said.
As for the controversial decision to send in SWAT? “Poor planning,” Limon said.
Limon made it clear that former Asst. Chief Melendez was the supervising officer during the raid. He was in charge “and lost control,” Limon said.
Asked if he thought an apology was in order, Limon said, “I take full responsibility.” The department has “learned some lessons” he said.
As a result of the internal affairs investigations, the department has created a new policy on video recording and will be training officers in the use of verbal commands and profanity.
Asked if the officers involved in the Elevate raid deserve to be disciplined, Limon said that’s up the Board of Police Commissioners, which will be review the Internal Affairs reports.
“We’ll definitely discuss it,” said Rick Epstein, head of the Board of Police Commissioners.
Smuts Weighs In
One interesting aspect of the report and Smuts’ memo is the way it handles the police chief, who has never before been mentioned in connection to the raid. The chief was there, and should have been responsible, according to Smuts’ memo.
Melendez gave the orders that night to send in SWAT officers to raid the private party at Club Elevate, and oversaw a scene in which one student (who apparently tried to attack cops) was Tased and other students were ordered not to use cell phones. But Limon was on the street right outside the club, on the scene at the outset of a crackdown on misbehavior in the downtown nightclub district.
“Based on the information outlined in the report, there is no reason to believe that Chief Frank Limon engaged in any behavior that is the subject of the civil complaints,” Smuts wrote. “The Chief did not participate in any of the arrests made and there is no indication that he addressed the civilians at all. That said, once upon the scene the Chief does have responsibility to use his rank and experience to judge whether subordinates were handling the situation properly and take any necessary action.”
Smuts’ memo offers a more detailed critique of the policy and training failures that underlay the police overreaction and missteps at Elevate:
• He said the department needs to plan better before conducting a raid. A fateful decision, to send in a second SWAT officer (thus heightening the tensions in a crowded room where there had been no report of violence or criminal activity) resulted from a lack of knowledge of the club’s layout, Smuts wrote.
• Cops need better training about when it’s OK to start swearing at people in order to up the response to a situation that might spin out of control, Smuts said. He also found it “concerning,” he said, that students interviewed in the report said cops had been swearing, but cops interviewed did not.
• Cops need to be trained about citizens’ rights to use cell phones, and how to communicate in circumstances when cell phones might pose a threat and therefore need to be put away or confiscated, Smuts wrote. (He didn’t offer specific examples of when citizens making phone calls or taking pictures has ever interfered with a New Haven police operation.)
• Smuts identified a troubling “gap between officer and civilian view of police behavior. … It is troubling to have such divergent accounts of police behavior, most notably about whether profanity was used.”