Thomas Breen file photo
Former city cop Morgillo (right) facing assault charges in court in 2019.
A state committee of law enforcement regulators voted unanimously to decertify former city cop Alex Morgillo — after the ex-New Haven officer with a history of domestic violence skipped a public hearing to defend his career following allegations that he lied in official police reports.
The action subcommittee of the Connecticut Police Officer Standards and Training Council (POST) made the decision to revoke Morgillo’s law enforcement license during their latest meeting over Zoom last Wednesday morning, with at least one commissioner citing Morgillo’s history of lying on the job and allegations of domestic violence as reasons to ensure the cop is banned forever from serving in Connecticut.
The Independent has filed a Freedom of Information Act request to review a recording of that meeting, which has yet to be disclosed to this reporter. Interviews with Keith Mello, the chairman of the POST Council and Milford police chief, and POST Commissioner Mike Lawlor, who is also a professor of criminal justice at the University of New Haven and a commissioner on New Haven’s Board of Police Commissioners, shed light on the implications of Wednesday’s vote.
The pair said that Morgillo — who this reporter was unable to contact by the publication time of this article — failed to dispute his own decertification. He therefore forfeited a chance to argue his case in a public hearing and was unanimously decertified by the council subcommittee by default, meaning he is now formally stripped of his certification as a police officer.
“In my view, this process is very important because I think people have a right to know that individuals who engage in this outrageous misconduct… have no place in law enforcement anywhere, especially Connecticut,” Lawlor said.
The behavior to which Lawlor referred included Morgillo’s repeated track record of not telling the truth on the job and allegedly assaulting his girlfriend.
New Haven Police Chief Karl Jacobson recommended that the city’s police commission fire Morgillo last year after an Internal Affairs (IA) investigation found that he had been untruthful in a memorandum he wrote up about an incident in which he allegedly failed to respond to a shooting where officers had requested assistance; failed to complete an incident report in a timely manner after a car crash; and swore in frustration at a supervisor. Read in detail about that string of reported wrongdoings — and additional incidents signaling Morgillo’s apparent lack of credibility — here.
Read here about how Morgillo was arrested in 2019 for allegedly beating up his then girlfriend. He was never convicted on the misdemeanor charges he faced — even though Morgillo didn’t dispute in court that he called his girlfriend a“little whore,” punched her in the face, threw her to the ground, and spat chewing tobacco at her.
Morgillo resigned in 2022 before the New Haven Board of Police Commissioners was able to convene for a vote on whether or not to fire him.
“He resigned while still under investigation for misconduct, which by itself made him ineligible to be a police officer in Connecticut,” Lawlor said. “If you resign while there’s an outstanding investigation against you, there’s no way around that.”
City Police Chief Karl Jacobson said that he was required by the state to put Morgillo up for decertification given that the ex-cop resigned during that IA investigation. “It is unfortunate that officers need to be fired and decertified, but we are committed to holding our officers accountable and being transparent,” Jacobson said. During his year and a half as chief, Jacobson said, he has recommended the state decertify nine different officers.
POST’s decision means that Morgillo is now not only barred from working as a police officer in Connecticut, but has also lost his certifying credentials, making it more difficult for him to serve elsewhere in the country, both because he would likely have to go through the process of getting recertified (an undertaking which varies in intensity across state lines) and because his record of having been decertified will likely dissuade other departments from hiring him.
“He did not show up in any way to contest the request for decertification, so the vote was almost by default,” Lawlor said about Wednesday’s hearing. “The basis was clearly his arrest and convictions for these offenses.”
Had Morgillo shown up to Wednesday’s hearing, he would have had the chance to work with a lawyer to present evidence disputing Jacobson’s findings, according to Lawlor.
Connecticut’s 2020 Police Accountability Act may have helped pave the way for Morgillo’s decertification. That legislation expanded the reasons the state might decertify an officer to include any “conduct undermining confidence in law enforcement,” including resigning while under internal investigation. In the past, POST rarely decertified officers, and mostly did so after cops were convicted with felonies, which Lawlor pointed out would already rid officers of their eligibility to use firearms, or when officers lied under oath.
Since that bill was passed, Lawlor said, “What I’ve seen more recently is there are a number of these [decertification requests from police chiefs, such as the one filed with POST by Jacobson against Morgillo] coming forward where the allegations really seem to focus on lying in an official investigation and filing false police reports in addition to getting arrested.”
“Connecticut has always had a decertification process,” Milford Police Chief and POST Chair Keith Mello said, “but in 2020 we [the POST Council] requested a more robust decertification process to have an added layer of accountability to make sure we weren’t retaining officers who were unsuitable for law enforcement.”
“We have many more requests for decertification post-2020 because there are more qualifying offenses. And the process is taking a lot longer, because there’s a three-step hearing and appeal process involved, which can be very time consuming — as it should be, because we want to get it right.”
Lawlor said the state has set a stricter standard imparting the importance of officers telling the truth at work. “You can’t say things that are not true and then act as if they were true and expect you’re just gonna get a letter of reprimand or a two-day suspension,” he said. Lying “undermines everything we do,” he asserted, and should result in cops losing their jobs.
Plus, he said, with evolving technology and related regulations, like mandated body cameras, digital record keeping and GPS trackers (the latter of which played a part in ultimately condemning Morgillo for supposedly falsifying records), it’s a lot more likely that cops who lie on the job “are gonna get caught” today than in years past.
“This is taxpayer money and we are holding you to a higher standard,” Lawlor said of police officers. “I mean, politicians lie all the time, but not under oath. You can’t do that. It’s serious.”