Were Assistant Police Chief Herman Badger and Ward 25 Alderwoman Ina Silverman merely showing their soft and vulnerable sides by displaying an armful of cute stuffed animals? The answer to that question was provided during the course of a get-to-know-you open house at the West Hills/Westville neighborhood substation, an answer that sheds light on community policing.
“We’re here,” said Silverman, “to meet the officers and have them meet us, so that when you see something happening, you can run out to the police cruiser, say, ‘Stop,’ and the cop will know you. I’ve done that. It works.”
“Absolutely,” said Badger as he and Silverman fought over a particularly adorable giraffe (not really). “We want to talk to people more and more about what keeps them up at night.”
What was keeping Pete Swan of Westville up at night were what he called the increases in non-violent yet disturbing crimes in the area. He cited car break-ins and thefts of bicycles from driveways, of which there were a rash in late summer. “I’m here to get a sense of the response to that,” said Swan, who teaches physics at Hopkins. “I’m not sure what the response has been,” he said. When asked his view of community policing in his area, he said, “I don’t know what community policing is.”
The top cop in the district, Sgt. Bernie Somers, who hosted the open house, made sure that Swan and the 25 or so people in attendance knew that in his view, and that of Assistant Chief Badger, community policing is alive and well, although of course there is room for improvement. “Above all,” said Somers, echoing most of the participants, “community policing is a partnership. We’re here for you, but you must there for us to, by, for example, revitalizing block watches.”
Harvey Feinberg, recently retired professor of African history at Southern and head of the now defunct New Haven Block Watch Association, asked, “It used to be a block watch caller to the police got some real attention. Is that still so?”
“Yes,” answered Somers, “a block watch call is given more credence than a non-block watch caller because we well might know the person, and he or she has also been given some training in identifying things, and so forth. It would be wonderful,” he added, with a disarming humor and honesty, “if we had a cop tree and we could pick one for each and every call, but it doesn’t work that way. No matter who the caller is, we dispatch according to priority.”
“It would be nice to revitalize the block watches,” Feinberg said.
Somers then went on to explain to Swan and the others that, “Yes, it’s Westville, but that place is not immune to crimes that were not here five or six years ago. Please, you have to lock your garages. The harder you guys make it for criminals, the better. Remember, if someone really wants to get into your place, the most sophisticated system cannot prevent it. But we are not dealing with Cary Grant cat burglars here. It’s mainly drug dependent people, many with mental illness. They don’t want to get caught, however. So if you just take care at your end. That’s part of the partnership”
Another part of the community policing picture is the work that Officer Sal Rodriguez explained to a reporter. Rodriguez, a 12-year veteran (here pointing to a caricature of himself done by the substation artist), has recently been deployed to Westville Manor and nearby areas with housing projects in various stages of rehabilitation. “We’re making ourselves much more visible to the kids. We’re talking to them. After all, the ones who are 16 and 17, I knew when they were little, so there’s a relationship. We try to get them involved with the Police Athletic League, or reconnect them with school if that’s a problem. Unfortunately, there’s dealing going on. We don’t arrest right away. We explain carefully, for example, the first time that they are in a drug zone where loitering is not allowed. If we see them there a second time, it’s a citation that costs them $99. A second time, a more serious citation for disorderly conduct, for example. The third time we have to get them into the system.”
Alderwoman Michelle Sepulveda, who represents the area Rodriguez was describing (shown here introducing herself and her son Juan Carlos to Officer Lucille Roach, who patrols with Rodriguez), said, “I believe community policing is alive and well. Yes, it could be a little more alive and ‘weller,’ but last month, in connection with other issues such as the proposed youth curfew, we had a meeting with Chief Ortiz and we asked him about the state of community policing and people needed to know what was going on, and this meeting is, in part, a response. And a good one, I think”
Alderwoman Silverman added, “Look, while overall crime is down, youth crime is up and the age of the kids is younger. I do think that after the requisite hearings we will pass some sort of youth curfew ordinance, and that is no solution itself, but as an aspect of community policing, yes, it will help. I mean we have to make sure there’s no profiling, that it passes constitutional tests and also that it doesn’t make police officers baby-sit the kids, but, honestly, some parents do need serious help. You need to know your cops and the cops need to know the kids and their parents.”
Which brings us back to the stuffed animals. Almost every police cruiser has a bagful of stuffed animals to give to a child caught up, for example, in a domestic abuse situation or other violent crime. “I carried a hefty bag of them,” Badger explained, “since about 1990 when we began our partnership with Yale.” He was referring to one of the least known aspects of community policing, the Child Development Community Policing Program (and trauma clinic). CDCP has been operated, over the last sixteen years, by Yale’s School of Medicine Child Study Center at 53 College St., and represented at the West Rock open-house by Carolyn Sicher, director of the program (pictured here on the right, with Assistant Chief of Police Stephanie Redding).
“We do a lot of ride-alongs,” Sicher explained, referring to the presence on nearly every police shift, particularly three to eleven and four to twelve, of at least one of CDCP’s twelve clinicians. So that some police cruisers are carrying not only stuffed animals but a psychiatrist, social worker or psychologist to attend immediately, and on the spot to the plight of kids facing violence or trauma. “Almost all our referrals are from the police, about 250 a year,” said Sicher, “and whether it takes two days or two years, we organize the intervention until a person is stabilized so that they can return to the community. Although we mostly work with smaller kids, we will work with young parents, so they can return to being parents too.”
A related aspect of CDCP’s work is the approximate 600 visits a year performed by staff, home visits to check up on scenes of past domestic violence. From the community policing, perspective, however, one of the most effective aspects of CDCP’s partnership with NHPD are what happens during the non-crisis hours. “When the streets are quiet,” Sicher explained, “we’ll stop the car and the kids will come down and we’ll introduce ourselves, form relationships with them, find out what’s going on. Whose parents are having problems and so forth. It’s not jut crisis driven by any means.”
Which is why when Silverman informed her constituents about the open house, she put out a call for people to bring the stuffed animals, and block watch captains Linden Grazier-Zerbarini (in the middle with daughter Yael on the left) and Barbara Shiller responded with a tiger and a bear. After all, the police cruisers needed replenishment, and community policing would not be the same without them.