The first time Abel Sanchez went into a courthouse, he reluctantly plead guilty to “disturbing the peace” and paid a fine. Thursday he made his second visit to an American hall of justice, outside the federal courthouse on Church Street. But this time, Sanchez wasn’t pleading or paying, he was protesting.
Sanchez was arrested in January by a police officer who is now at the center of a new federal civil rights lawsuit against the City of New Haven, filed Monday.
Click the play button to watch Sanchez address supporters. Click here to read a previous story based on his affidavit, and here to read a story based on the police report.
Sanchez is one of six Latinos who filed a federal lawsuit Monday with the activist group Unidad Latina en Accion against the city. The defendants, and the people who joined them on the steps in front of the federal courthouse for a Monday rally, said the city showed “deliberate indifference” to allegations of police misconduct.
Sanchez spoke alongside activists Barbara Fair and Shelton Tucker of People Against Injustice, who have also been collecting information about alleged incidents of police misconduct in New Haven. Fair encouraged her nephew Dramese Fair to file a complaint with Internal Values and Ethics in 2007 for a strip search inside the Congress Avenue substation.
Click here and here to read about that.
Fair said she had three other complaints of improper strip searches against New Haven cop Dennis O’Connell that allegedly occurred inside the Congress Avenue substation. The complaints date back to 2006, Fair said. O’Connell is the officer at the center of the new lawsuit; he and his union have defended his actions in the cases.
“It took a whole year for them to finally do something, which was next to nothing,” Fair said of the internal affairs process. “My nephew said he was so humiliated, so degraded that he wanted to cry. The only thing that kept him from crying was the thought of revenge,” Fair said.
Click the play arrow to see what she said next.
Growing up in New Haven, Shelton Tucker, Fair’s son, said he has filed three or four complaints against police officers for everything from harassment to excessive force, but has never gotten anything but a letter from Internal Affairs notifying him that his case has been closed.
“I saw today our police chief talking about prostitution in our community and wanting to clean up our streets,” Tucker said. He said it’s a quality of life issue. He said it blurs the lines between right and wrong. I think police brutality does the same thing. It’s a quality of life issue,” Tucker said. “So I want to say something to the new police chief. If you want to do some house cleaning you need to start in your police department, because dirty cops can’t clean up the streets.”
Paul Garlinghouse, the Lawyer representing the Latino plaintiffs, said the PERF report criticized the NHPD internal affairs process, saying they don’t investigate thoroughly enough, and that cases get closed out without any resolution.
Four officers had more than one complaint against them in 2006, Garlinghouse said, but action was never taken against them.
“It’s not just Dennis O’Connell who is responsible for this, it’s also his supervisors,” Garlinghouse said. “To this day they still haven’t responded to my first complaint, and I hope that after this, tomorrow things will change.”
The group of about 50 demonstrators marched from the courthouse to the police station, where they continued to rally.