From the police department to the schools to neighborhood voting precincts, New Haveners made new demands on entrenched power this past year, and now face the challenge of translating protest into palpable change in 2012.
Click on the play arrows to the videos in this story — and click on the highlighted words below — to revisit some of the memorable moments in which people at the grassroots found strength in numbers, and plotted strategy, the old guard stepped aside, or newcomers emerged as new challengers.
It began in February when 200 cops launched a raucous march through downtown streets to protest the layoffs of 16 young officers. They took the protest straight to the mayor’s office. The video at the top of the story caught some of the highlights.
Most of those cops quickly found jobs in other departments, their training paid for by New Haven taxpayers — only to see new money come in to hire other officers to re-fill their slots. Meanwhile, protest leader Louis Cavaliere subsequently stepped down as police union president after 30 years at the helm; his performance at the protest march symbolized the era that will now pass.
It was a year of marches, big, noisy marches, bringing out people from all walks of life. Many centered on the issue that tore the city’s heart this year: The murder of 34 people, most of them African-American. Other marches focused on the need for jobs amid a recession, or contested government budget-cutting. This rally took on both safety and jobs at once. The rally in the video brought together existing community groups with a new force in town: “Occupy New Haven,” anti-corporate-greed protesters who set up one of the nation’s most enduring protest tent cities, on the Green.
The protesters often left the tents to challenge bankers, like the guy in this video.
A former gang-banger named Darrell “D‑Russ” Allick, whose brother was one of 2011’s murder victims, brought a crowd to an ‘Ice The Beef” rally at Hillhouse aimed at convincing people to stop shooting; he and others participated in another soul-searching “Don’t Shoot” gathering along the same lines days later at Co-Op High. In 2012, he and others will try to make good on promises to organize grassroots youth programs and violence-prevention efforts.
Most of the year’s murders involved African-American men, many of whom knew each other and had some connection to illegal activity. One 13-year-old aspiring hoopster (see video), Marquell “Quelly” Banks, died when one of the older kids he was hanging out with pulled the trigger while playing with a gun, according to witnesses and police. An 8‑year-old boy perished along with her mother and aunt in a Fair Haven arson that police believe was drug-related.
One more random murder startled both the underground music and bicycle scenes in town, and across the nation: the shooting death of bike repairman/musician Mitchell Dubey during an apparent robbery attempt at his Newhallville communal apartment.
Meanwhile, another issue that drew grassroots heat was the city’s ongoing school reform drive. A Wilbur Cross High School student named Isaiah Lee led students to a protest on the Green demanding cutbacks in administrator salaries and more spending on textbooks. His principal, Peggy Moore, responded by disbanding Lee’s political club at the school, then nullifying a student election he won. She even canceled an event by a group he led helping kids with disabilities. Mayor John DeStefano publicly backed Moore’s actions amid criticism that stifling free speech and protest damages the city’s school-reform drive. Lee’s mother, Benita Lee, brought the issue to a school board meeting, criticizing the principal’s “bullying” and “retaliation.”
School board member Alex Johnston echoed her complaints. Moore responded by lashing out at the idea of questioning her actions. Officials let the discussion end there.
Despite promises of “transparent” school reform, school officials blocked public discussion of a plan to privatize Roberto Clemente Leadership Academy, then tried to hold an illegal “emergency” rubber-stamping board meeting about it.
Later a school official tried to prevent pre-arranged news coverage of the school’s changes from taking place without a district official being present to monitor what was said; he grabbed a reporter’s camera and tried to order it shut off. He subsequently resigned his position as a result.
After 18 years in power, Mayor John DeStefano faced his first serious challenge in this year’s mayoral campaigns. First, three candidates petitioned successfully to make the ballot and challenge him in the Democratic mayoral primary. This video shows Wendell Harp role-playing with volunteers in the Clifton Graves campaign to practice gathering signatures on petitions. (Harp, an architect and black community powerbroker, passed away later in the year, ending another era in New Haven.)
The challengers won more than a majority of the primary vote, but divided it, enabling DeStefano to win. Meanwhile, an anti-City Hall slot of challengers, backed by Yale’s unions, won more than half the seats on the Board of Aldermen, startling the city (and themselves). Now they’re hard at work figuring out how to turn their constituents’ demands into new job-creating and crime-fighting measures. In November’s general election, one of DeStefano’s three mayoral challengers, Tony Dawson, turned around and endorsed him; in this video, he is asked at the endorsement to square his withering previous criticisms of the mayor with his new support.
In New Haven, which last elected a Republican mayor in 1951, the Democratic primary is usually tantamount to a general election. But this year DeStefano had to run a second hotly contested race in the general election. Jeffrey Kerekes, a newcomer to electoral politics with little name recognition or money (DeStefano outspent him roughly 20 – 1), managed to capture 45 percent of the vote. So DeStefano won a record 10nth two-year term (beating this guy’s record), but he immediately set about responding to the clear demands for change. He has a new police chief promising to return community policing to New Haven, instance.
Away from the tumult, a jazz epiphany took place at Firehouse 12, the cutting-edge music spot in the midst of an ever-thriving and colorful downtown scene. The epiphany: Slide guitar goes with cello. Especially with some Southern rock thrown in.