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Officers drag Cox's injured body into cell on June 19.
“Training, and complacency.”
Assistant Police Chief Karl Jacobson took aim at those two concerns when pressed during a public-radio interview about how detention center police officers could have treated a seriously injured arrestee with such disregard.
That interview took place Friday morning on WNPR’s “Where We Live” program with host Lucy Nalpathanchil, on a day when New Haven police officers’ handling of 36-year-old Richard “Randy” Cox became a national story.
The first two segments of the WNPR episode were about the case involving Cox, who remains hospitalized and paralyzed after sustaining a spinal injury while in police custody on June 19.
Jacobson (who’s in line to become the next police chief) and Mayor Justin Elicker were the featured guests during the second part of the WNPR episode. (This reporter was the guest during the radio program’s first segment.)
Click here to listen to the WNPR episode in full, and click here and here to read articles published by CNN and the New York Times on Wednesday about the Cox case.
Thomas Breen photo
Asst. Chief Jacobson at Tuesday night's NAACP-organized meeting in Dixwell.
Nalpathanchil asked Jacobson about why the police officers at the 1 Union Ave. detention center were so dismissive of Cox when he said he was injured and couldn’t move; why they said he was drunk and simply not trying hard enough to stand up; and how they could have missed the clear signs that this man was in physical distress, and chose instead to pull him out of the van, process him in a wheelchair, and drag him into a holding cell.
Jacobson said he “was deeply disturbed” by what happened to Cox in police custody. “This is not the way that we [police officers] should treat people,” Jacobson said.
He also responded to Nalpathanchil by identifying two causes for concern.
“There’s training, and complacency,” he said.
Yes, the department needs more and better training to make sure situations like this don’t happen again, he said. He cited the department’s recent adoption of both Active Bystandership for Law Enforcement (ABLE) training as well as the Integrating Communications, Assessment, and Tactics (ICAT) program as a step in the right direction.
“But also leadership. Strong leadership will overcome complacency,” Jacobson continued.
He noted that the department has had nine different police chiefs since he joined the force in 2007.
“That change at the top constantly leads to complacency,” he said. “We need to have strong leadership for a long period of time.”
Key moments of the police arrest, transport, and detention of Richard Cox.
Nalpathanchil asked Elicker about this issue of “complacency” within the police department, and how that may have affected how officers responded to Cox.
“I think that what happened to Mr. Cox was just awful and completely unacceptable,” the mayor replied. “It clearly falls short of the high standards that we have in the New Haven Police Department, and it’s not going to be tolerated.”
He noted that there have been “a lot of questions about culture in the police department. In my view, having watched the videos many times, I don’t think from what I have seen there there is a culture of police brutality in the New Haven Police Department. There was an extreme callousness” in this case.
He spoke of the importance of “foster[ing] a culture of intervention, of officers who have the tools and the support that they need to stop other officers when they have questions about following procedure. … We’re working to implement more training that is in this vein.”
But if there is not a “culture of police brutality” in New Haven, Nalpathanchil followed up, “how does this happen?” How is a clearly injured man “ignored and mocked” by the officers who have custody over him?
“We’ve all been asking ourselves” that question, Elicker said. “How can these officers have done this?”
He noted that the officers “had an attitude of mistrust of the individual despite Mr. Cox asking for help. … We want to make sure that this never, ever happens again.”
One way to do that, Jacobson said, is to ensure that “we don’t just discipline and move on, discipline and move on” when officers do something wrong. He said he plans to institute an “early warning system” within the department that emphasizes mentorship in addition to discipline for officers who have, say, “rudeness complaints” filed against them.
“We need to identify problems, fix them, have mentorship, and if they’re not fixing them, then we need to get rid of these officers,” he said. If officers treat people the way that Cox was treated, he said, “we don’t want them to be police officers.”
In a Thursday afternoon interview on WNHH’s “Kica’s Corner” radio program with host Kica Matos (which can be listened to in full above), Jacobson returned again to the importance of mentorship in helping avoid major officer misconduct down the road.
“We need to uplift people,” he said. “We normally just suspend people and move on.” That doesn’t work because, without quality mentorship, officers may just repeat the same mistakes — or worse.
“It starts with rudeness complaints and it may end up with a situation like Mr. Cox’s,” he said. “We don’t want that.”
Jacobson added that he prays for Cox and Cox’s family “every day.”
When Matos described the police officers’ treatment of Cox as caught on video as “horrifying,” Jacobson spoke about just how important it is for him — as someone looking to become the next police chief — to watch that video.
“I’ve watched the video over and over again,” he said. “You know why? Because I don’t want to forget. That’s my job as chief.” To not forget what happened to Cox, and to make sure it never happens again.