New Haven’s Father Jim Manship started a push for change in East Haven when he exposed police misconduct. Tuesday, that process took a step backward, in his view.
Manship was reacting to the news that East Haven’s new mayor, Joseph Maturo, has reinstated Leonard Gallo as his town’s police chief.
Gallo had been put on leave when the feds started investigating rampant racial discrimination and other misconduct by the cops under Gallo’s direction. That probe has continued, and arrests are expected soon.
That didn’t stop Maturo from reinstating Gallo Tuesday. As reported here by WTNH, Maturo noted at the press conference that no formal charges have been brought against Gallo at this point. “If there is any other matter concerning the Chief or EHPD they will be faced at that particular time, but there is no reason in the world someone [would be] on administrative leave for a year and half with no charges,” WTNH quoted Maturo as saying.
The feds began their probe of Gallo’s cops after a Father Manship went to East Haven to protest profiling of Latinos. The cops arrested him in February of 2009 when he started video-recording their actions. They claimed in an arrest report that they thought he had a gun in his hand. But the video subsequently surfaced showing the cops clearly knew he had a camera, not a gun. (Click here to read about that; click on the play arrow at the top of the story to watch the video.) Manship is the priest at Fair Haven’s St. Rose of Lima Church, which has many Latino immigrants among its congregants.
“It is astounding that Mayor Maturo has chosen to reinstate a police chief who presided over an institution that created a culture of impunity for harassment and abuse of Latinos,” Manship stated in a release issued Tuesday. “Law enforcement experts, from the Police Executive Research Forum to the United States Department of Justice, identified fundamental policy deficiencies within the East Haven Police Department under Gallo’s watch. Many community members, myself included, suffered firsthand the consequences of these deficiencies.
“The Department needs to change. East Haven deserves a Department that respects and protects all of its residents, not one that sticks to the failed policies of the past that eroded public confidence in the police.”
Gallo was once a high-ranking New Haven cop considered a future chief until he was squeezed out when community policing came to the department and his approach went out of favor. In New Haven.