Paul Bass photo
Alternative to arrests: COMPASS crew members Yichu Xu and Nanette Campbell help out Ollie Cooper at crisis team's launch last fall.
How should New Haven police respond to the use and sale of drugs?
New Haven’s mayoral candidates are putting forward a variety of answers to that question, propelling the issue of when (and whether) to arrest people into this year’s campaign.
The candidates’ most recent debate — organized by the Room For All Coalition at Albertus Magnus College and attended by a hundred audience members on Thursday evening — focused on housing policy. But a member of the audience asked how each would address the effects of mass incarceration and immigration detention on New Haveners’ lives. That prompted a nuanced conversation.
Four mayoral candidates — Democratic incumbent Mayor Justin Elicker, Democratic challengers Shafiq Abdussabur and Liam Brennan, and Independent challenger Wendy Hamilton — remained onstage by the time illegal substance use and sales arose as a subject. (Democratic challenger Tom Goldenberg had left partway through the debate to attend a ward committee meeting.)
In response to the audience question about mass incarceration, Brennan polled the room.
“How many people here have loved or know someone who has suffered from addiction?” he asked.
More than a dozen hands shot up.
“How many of y’all thinks they would have benefited from going to jail?” Brennan asked.
Audience members lowered their hands, and some began to murmur.
Brennan continued with a call to move away from arresting people for using drugs. “We know that doesn’t work. And we know that the war on drugs has failed. And just like we declared that we will not cooperate with federal immigration authorities, we need to indicate that we will not cooperate with federal drug enforcement in that way.”
Elicker responded by maintaining that New Haven already has that practice. “We do not arrest people for drug use. We arrest drug dealers,” he said. “And I’m sorry, but fentanyl is destroying our communities and we need to hold drug dealers accountable.”
He noted that his administration created Elm City COMPASS, a team of social workers and peer advocates who respond to certain 911 calls — including substance use calls — without police presence. He touted more funding for community-based violence interruption organizations and the re-entry welcome center created under his administration.
Brennan disagreed with Elicker’s assessment of the police department’s current practices.
“In 2020, 40 percent of all arrests in New Haven were for drugs, even though across the state the average was 7.6 percent,” he said. “It’s gone down since then, I will give you that, it has actually gone down. But that [2020 statistic] occurred under this administration.”
Elicker refuted this claim: “What is not clear about ‘Our drug arrests have dramatically decreased’? To say there’s a war on drugs is not appropriate and not fair to the people in our police department.”
According to the New Haven Police Department, police made 563 “drug-related arrests” in 2020 — about 9 percent, not 40 percent, of the total number of arrests that year. The percentage of New Haven arrests pertaining to drug-related crimes has decreased from 12 percent in 2019 to 5 percent in 2022, according to the police department.
City of New Haven
The police department’s figures are roughly confirmed by the statistics it submitted to the National Incident-Based Reporting Program.
Police Chief Karl Jacobson said that the New Haven Police Department has decreased arrests for drug possession, which he said now typically occur in the context of drug dealing and other crimes. “We may have an area where there’s a lot of drug use — we may make arrests on the drug dealers.”
Jacobson said that in his career, having worked for a time in drug enforcement, “I saw the damage that federal drug cases did to Black and Brown community members, personally.”
“Now that we have COMPASS and we have partners like Clifford Beers, Yale Child Study, and other partners that walk with us and do things with us,” he added, “we try to get people the services they need. Services for drug use is far better than arresting.”
Drug Dealing Vs. Drug Use
Clockwise from top right: Shafiq Abdussabur, Justin Elicker, Wendy Hamilton, Liam Brennan.
When candidate Abdussabur, a retired police sergeant, had a chance to share his input at the debate, he offered a different vision from Elicker’s position on arresting drug dealers, not drug users.
Having grown up in New Haven, Abdussabur said, “I came [back] home in ’91. Crack cocaine had destroyed everything I knew about home in this city. People that we knew got locked up for crack in their pocket. As a police officer, I locked up people with crack in their pocket.”
“Now I’m hearing, ‘Let’s lock up all the drug dealers,’ ” Abdussabur continued. “We don’t bring fentanyl into Newhallville. We don’t own fentanyl factories.”
He argued that New Haven should avoid drug-related arrests altogether.
“Yes, it’s a deadly drug, and we need to do something. Let’s get at the root cause of why people are using fentanyl. Fix that!” he said. “Trauma, housing, jobs, food insecurity. Let’s deal with those issues. Let’s not lock up the remaining of the community that’s struggling to live.”
Brennan, meanwhile, has come out against arrests for drug “possession” throughout the campaign. He reiterated that belief in an interview after the debate.
When asked directly about Elicker’s distinction between drug dealers and drug users, Brennan replied, “That’s a tricky one.” He argued that arrests for “possession with the intent to sell” may not actually be targeting drug dealers.
“We’re not gonna have people selling out in public, under any scenario. You can stop that: you can confiscate,” he said.
“I do understand there’s a basis for arrest. Our step is no more possession arrests,” he added. Any measures beyond that would entail a “community conversation.”
Independent mayoral candidate Wendy Hamilton went further.
“You may not like hearing this, but I would like all drugs to be legal. … We should legalize everything,” she said.
She spoke of her experience with aging — “old age sucks!” — and the pain that often comes with it: “I’d like a Percocet once in a while, but I can’t get it.”
The audience burst into laughter. Hamilton kept going: “The state has ridiculous narcotics laws. Legalize narcotics! A lot of our problems will be over.”