We can do better: Brennan unveils "white paper" at Temple Plaza presser.
A scared teenager was relieved to see the cops arrive. Then he saw fear in the face of the man the cops stopped for allegedly trying to break into his home.
The frightened 13-year-old was Liam Brennan.
Thirty-one years later, Brennan told that story in Temple Plaza Thursday at a press conference. Brennan is running for the Democratic mayoral nomination. (Watch him tell it in the video below.) He told the story to introduce a “white paper” he was releasing about how he would seek to “rethink” public safety if elected.
The story took place one night when Brennan was home alone with his sister. A man tried to break into the house. They “huddled under a desk and called 911.” The would-be intruder fled. Police arrived fast. Brennan was relieved.
Hours later officers drove Brennan to view a man they had stopped on suspicion of being the guilty party. The man “was held on the sidewalk with two officers holding each of his arms, light shining in his face. I’ve never seen someone look so unsafe or in fear as that man that evening.”
Plus, it turned out he wasn’t the guy.
To that end, Brennan’s “white paper” examines areas for improving public safety policy. (Click here to read the full paper.)
One area: Drugs. He called for treating drug use as a health problem, not a crime, and directing people to medical help rather than prison.
“There are plenty of people who use and distribute drugs at Yale and in Westville, who do so with impunity, never fearing consequences from law enforcement,” wrote Brennan, who lives in Westville and attended Yale Law School. “However, someone in Newhallville or Fair Haven engaging in the same activity could end up with long prison sentences and a felony record. This two-tiered system of law enforcement is not only unjust, it undermines the rule of law because it turns legal impartiality into a farce.”
The paper argues that policing dollars can be spent better on tasks other than locking up users.
He was asked about a statement he had made in an earlier interview suggesting that he would direct officers not to arrest drug dealers, either. He clarified that he believes officers should confiscate illegally sold drugs, and keep after dealers so they conclude it’s not worth returning to spots where they’ll lose their stash.
He also said he supports a proposal to pilot a safe-injection site in New Haven, which the Elicker administration also supports. (Read about that here.)
Brennan called for focusing more intensely on removing illegal guns from New Haven, since they’re involved in the majority of cases of deadly violence. He would do that in part by replicating on a municipal level a state program to track illegal guns, using “police commissioner subpoenas to develop evidence about the existence and location of illegal guns” and create a “skilled legal advisor” position “to develop evidence to help cops develop evidence necessary for investigatory subpoenas and defend them when challenged in court.”
“We know that more guns in the environment generates more gun deaths, and we shouldn’t sleep easy if we’re not doing all we can to limit access to illegal guns in our community,” the report states.
If elected, Brennan stated, he would seek to create an “inspector general” position similar to one he holds in Hartford to independently probe police misconduct complaints, then report findings to the police chief and the Civilian Review Board. Arguing that police shouldn’t be investigating themselves, Brennan said he would reassign officers from internal affairs to other public safety work. Brennan works as the Hartford inspector general, a role in which he has drawn fire from the police union. (Brennan said that he has since formally resigned from the full-time position and is working part-time on an interim basis as he also runs for mayor.)
Mayor Justin Elicker questioned Brennan’s proposals.
He called it “odd” to call for a new inspector general on a week when the police chief has moved to fire four officers for misconduct, bringing to nine the total number of cops he has moved to fire in the past nine months. The mayor argued that the civilian review board and police commission provide enough “checks on the system” without the need to “try to fix something that isn’t broken” by creating a new position.
He said drug arrests have gone down, with cops focusing on dealers rather than users. “I stand by arresting dealers,” Elicker said. He also said the cops are “being very productive in identifying and taking illegal guns off the street” under the current system, with 80 illegal weapons seized so far this year.