David Sepulveda Photo
Cops making of the arrests at the Saturday event.
Allan Appel Photo
Chief Campbell reports to commissioners Tuesday night.
“We told them there was no KKK. Social media fueled itself.”
That was, in part, the explanation of how on Saturday a half-dozen out-of-town white nationalists assembling to hear a speaker on the Green (who never showed up) attracted 150 protesters who were expecting much worse. And how a violent fracas ensued, with four arrests and the injury to an officer. Despite intelligence work done in advance by the police.
Police Chief Anthony Campbell offered that brief analysis as one item of his regular report to Board of Police Commissioners at 1 Union Avenue.
Campbell told the commissioners that in the run-up to the event, there was backing and forthing between the department and the folks he termed “the opposition” on just who was coming to the Green. The group, called the Proud Boys, are “nationalists,” but claim not to be Nazis or Ku Klux Klan members.
“We told them there was no KKK,” Campbell said.
Counterdemonstrators on the march to the Green.
Without going into detail, he described a series of communications between the police and the opposition in which there were different assessments of what would occur. “We had no valid intelligence confirming a KKK,” Campbell said, but he indicated that the local antiracism activists who organized a counterprotest on social media thought otherwise.
Who showed up, the Proud Boys, were “no KKK, no white supremacist group,” he claimed. “These were a white nationalist group, six people [who ended up being] assaulted on the Green” by protesters using paint balloons, smoke grenades, and old-fashioned kicks.
The group is headquartered in East Haven, the department knows who they are individually, and their speaker ended up being stuck in traffic on the way to New Haven and never showed up, he said.
Still, “they [counterprotesters] got 150 people there looking for the KKK.”
Commissioners asked Campbell for clarification if either side had a permit. Campbell said no permits had been issued for the event. Therefore, unlawful assembly was the basis for dispersal of the parties on both sides after about 30 minutes, he said. Cops escorted the Proud Boys to safety.
In addition to the four opposition members arrested, Campbell said, one officer was injured, not on the Green but on her way to it. The officer’s cruiser door was hit by a passing car when she opened it. She sustained minor injuries, went to the hospital, and was released, the chief reported.
The department is conducting an after-action assessment, which is including looking at more video of the event, and will report findings at a press conference on Friday, he said.
For now the apparent true culprit here in the chief’s analysis is an over-active and inaccurate social media environment. In the future, “we’re going to work more closely [in this regard] with the community,” he said.
The after-action assessment, particularly the video tape, might result in more arrests, he added.
Protester and “Proud Boy” after one of the nonviolent conversations that also took place.