The Latin Kings and another gang were on the verge of a rumble. Ronnell Higgins and one other officer were alone. Their best option: Start talking.
The incident occurred at a Bridgeport jail. Higgins was a corrections officer then, not a police officer.
Higgins learned an important lesson about communicating and defusing violence that day, and many other days, at the Bridgeport Correctional Center. It proved to be a training ground for a future cop who’d apply the ideas of community policing to the streets of New Haven.
Higgins has a new perch from which to promote community policing: This week he became assistant chief of the 83-member Yale police force. He’s believed to be the first African-American to hold the position.
The position had been vacant for 10 years. Chief James Perrotti said he decided to fill it because the department has grown so fast. In conjunction with city cops, Yale’s force patrols a swath of town from Daggett Street in the Hill to East Rock’s Highland, from Dwight Street east to Church Street.
In his new job, Higgins, who’s 37, will oversee the patrol division (which he used to supervise), investigative services (where he once served as second in command), communications, and training.
He calls himself a “product of the New Haven Police Academy.” He trained there in 1996, at the height of community policing. He embraces the philosophy, from the idea of lots of cops patrolling on foot, bike (or Segway, which two Yale cops do), to communicating often with people to discover potential problems before they turn into trouble.
“Isn’t that what community policing is all about?” he said during an interview in his second-floor office at the Yale p.d.‘s new Ashmun Street home. “Finding out what the problem is? A lot of times it’s not a crime. Lights. Or ‘Let’s get the milk crates out from under the windows.’ Communicate, communicate, communicate.”
Higgins first came to embrace that mantra in his three and a half years at the Bridgeport jail. At the time he had resisted the idea of following his father, then-New Haven Lt. Reginald Higgins, into a police career. Instead, he thought he became a corrections officer.
“You had everyone from felony murderers to 30-day DUI (driving under the influence) offenders,” Higgins recalled. “You’re outnumbered — two officers to 75 inmates. Your interpersonal skills come into play.”
On that Memorial Day, for instance, when “the Latin Kings were in a disagreement” — a hot disagreement — with another gang in the jail.
Higgins was in charge of Memorial 2 Dormitory. Only one other officer was with him. The rest of the officers had been called to attend to an emergency in another part of the jail.
Higgins knew he and his colleague couldn’t contain a fight.
“So we decided to talk and broke a truce with the groups. It would have made for a bad day if things went down,” said Higgins, a man inclined to understatement.
“We talked with them about what the problem was.” Close quarters appeared to be the root of the problem: “Nobody wants to sleep next to someone who’s smelly.”
Turned out one of the gangs’ newer inmates hadn’t yet “really picked up on the cleanliness code” in his first week behind bars. Higgins pulled him aside. “I asked him to take a shower.” Which he did.
No riot.
The police “bug” finally “got me,” Higgins said, in 1996. He became a Yale cop in 1997 and rose steadily through the ranks.
Along the way, he worked closely with two New Haven cops active with young people in the Dixwell neighborhood: Shafiq Abdussabur and District Manager Anthony Duff. Higgins participated in Abdussabur’s CTribat program. He showed up at anti-violence Brotherhood Leadership Summits in Dixwell. Both Duff and Abudssabur said Higgins has been a bridge between the two departments.
Meanwhile Yale has been building bridges in Dixwell. At the neighborhood’s request, it built is new police station there combined with the Rose Center, a space for youth programs; and it is helping to revive Scantlebury Park.
At first Higgins patrolled downtown on the midnight shift in his Yale police job. Colleagues were surprised at how many people he knew on the street. He may have gone from “jail to Yale,” as some put it, but so did some of his “former clients.” (He used that phrase.)
Some were returning to New Haven after their sentences; Higgins might run into them on their ways home from a second- or third-shift job. Others had moved to halfway houses here.
Many of the reunions were friendly, Higgins said. One reunion was with a man he’d first met in a jail corridor one day. The man, who’d been involved with gangs, was serving an extended term. He was on his way to visit a fellow inmate in another part of the jail — his teenaged son, who was staring at 15 to 20 years himself.
“The father broke down afterwards. He said, ‘I wasn’t there for my son.’” Higgins arranged to have the man moved to a part of the jail closer to his son, so they’d bump into each other more often.
On the Yale beat, Higgins said, he found communicating with people equally crucial. In responding to noise complaints, for instance.
“It’s a college campus. People are going to play loud music,” Higgins said. He’ll “explain to the student, ‘There are other people who live here. You have a responsibility to them.’ Explain it this way instead of saying, ‘Turn it down!’ Modern-day leaders lead by understanding, not intimidation.”
Higgins lives in Morris Cove with his wife Robin Higgins, a New haven police detective (they met on a joint domestic-violence case) and their two young children. “I love New Haven,” Higgins said.
Would he love to be Yale’s police chief one day?
“Who wouldn’t?” he replied. But he’s not thinking about that, he said. “I have a lot of work to do. I have to concentrate on being assistant chief. I’m fortunate to be where I am.”
(To read other installments in the Independent’s “Cop of the Week” series, click here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
(To suggest an officer to be featured, click here.)