Paul Bass Photo
Johnson: New Haven needs more New Haveners as cops.
A U.S. senator heard about New Haven’s successes with community policing — along with a handful of tangible ideas to bring back to Washington.
Blumenthal at the confab with the Rev. James Newman.
The senator, Dick Blumenthal of Connecticut, heard all that during an hour-long discussion with city leaders and activists held Monday morning in Mayor Toni Harp’s conference room at City Hall.
He didn’t hear much about some recent episodes that contradict the official narrative.
Speakers at the gathering praised New Haven police’s efforts to work with the community and help reduce violence while avoiding the tensions behind last week’s killings in Minnesota, Louisiana, and Texas. Blumenthal and U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro said they wanted to take some of New Haven’s lessons to their legislative colleagues to spread nationwide.
Esserman offers a list.
New Haven Police Chief Dean Esserman came prepared with a list of suggestions. One included creating a nationwide policing “curriculum” to advise local departments on best practices.
“There is no national coherent strategy for American policing,” he said. “Community policing is not going on in every community.”
He also suggested reinvigorating the federal COPS program, which enabled departments like New Haven’s to field more walking patrols; and funding a federal program for police-clergy gatherings like the ones Esserman holds with New Haven ministers.
Harp, who had a message for DeLauro and Blumenthal about their uphill gun-control fight: “Don’t get discouraged.”
DeLauro suggested replicating the program that teams New Haven cops with Yale Child Study Center clinicians to work with children who witness or experience involved in violence.
Only at the very end of the session did someone — an unscheduled speaker who stepped forward to offer his views — bring up an elephant in the room: The overwhelming “no confidence” vote city cops held last week against the chief. The speaker, veteran New Haven activist Otis Johnson, suggested that vote might have stemmed from the department’s long-term challenge in hiring enough New Haveners to become cops, rather than out-of-towners who don’t understand or relate to urbandwellers. Johnson also suggested vetting prospective cops better and more promptly getting rid of officers known to be violent and abusive.
“Dignity and respect are what matter more than anything — even when you arrest” people, Esserman told the senator.
What The Senator Didn’t Hear Or See
Left unspoken at the gathering were the numerous incidents in which New Haven police have failed to enforce a stated commitment to protect the rights of citizens to video-record police at work, the primary tool that’s been used nationwide to document abuses; or to or otherwise hold them accountable — for instance, through a viable civilian review board.
There was no mention, for instance, of the “dignified and respectful” April 30 arrest of a woman who video-recorded cops arresting a disruptive person outside the Beverage Boss store on Whalley Avenue, captured in the above video. When the woman got closer than officers believed reasonable, she wasn’t just ushered away — she was arrested by the officers, one of whom told her, “Get the fuck out or you get locked up too!” Esserman publicly backed the cops in that arrest and defended their actions.
Nor was there mention of the city’s settlement of two lawsuits for violating the rights of other citizens video-recording arrests, including seizing their cameras. The department dragged its feet in a promised minor tweaking of a general order aimed at supposedly protecting citizens’ rights to video-record so that the chief felt he could enforce it. That took a year and a half. (Here’s the rewritten general order, which was approved in October 2015.)
There was no mention of the March 2015 arrest of a handcuffed African-American teenage girl whom a white cop from the suburbs slammed down to the pavement.
There was no mention of the Nov. 20, 2015, arrest of immigration-rights activist John Lugo on “interfering” charges after a diner inside Goodfellas Restaurant on State Street objected to hearing a wage-theft protest out on the street. That arrest, too, never drew a public rebuke or reconsideration from police brass.