Markeshia Ricks Photo
Mayor Toni Harp congratulates Helliger Friday while Assistant Chief Anthony Campbell looks on.
Patricia Helliger’s historic promotion to the rank of captain at a celebratory City Hall ceremony Friday was not lost on her or the people she calls her “beloved community.”
Not only did she become the first black woman in the city’s police department to pin on the rank of captain. She did it during Black History Month.
“I stand before you today with God’s grace and mercy today,” Helliger said to more than 100 people who packed the second floor of City Hall, drawing applause, “amen”s and “hallelujah”s.
Helliger gives a thumbs up to the crowd.
“Today I rise as Patricia Helliger, first black woman captain of the New Haven Police Department,” she concluded.
That last line drew the biggest applause
Helliger spoke about the first black man to be a police officers in Selma, Ala. after the Civil War and the first black woman to wear the uniform, an officer of the Los Angeles Police Department.
She also spoke of reacting with joy when she learned that she would be promoted, but a sense of awkwardness that it took 20 years, the entirety of her career until now, for a black woman to reach such a level.
Though Helliger achieved a first, Chief Dean Esseman pointed out that she joins a sisterhood of female leadership in the department that include former Assistant Chief Petisia Adger (who is also African-American), recently retired Capt. Holly Wasilewski and current head of the Police Academy Capt. Julie Johnson.
Helliger is badged by her nephew.
He praised Helliger’s work keeping alive the efforts of Dixwell matriarch and leader Mae Ola Reddick, and passed along congratulations from the man who hired Helliger, former Chief Nick Pastore.
Mayor Toni Harp said that promotion ceremonies give the city a measure of pride and a chance to celebrate the work of the police department.
She said that Helliger was “a lieutenant who has served this city well and now about to become Capt. Helliger, and we are so proud of you.”
From Stewardess To Cop
During the National Anthem.
“With a progressive department like we are, I just think it’s a shame that it took this long really,” Helliger said in an interview earlier this week. “It’s very disheartening for me to realize I’m the first black female captain, and despite what people might think, it was not by design.”
Helliger, who oversees the department’s records division, said she is in a curious place for a woman who never planned on breaking any glass ceilings.
“I was really surprised,” she said. “I didn’t say ‘I’m going to become a lieutenant, and I’m going to stay here until I become captain.’ It was never a thought, that there was never a black female captain. But it is really important to break that glass ceiling and say that this can be done.”
Friendly Skies For Mean Streets
Helliger gives a thumbs up to the crowd.
In fact, Helliger didn’t start out to be a cop, period. She started her professional life as a flight attendant.
When she graduated from Stony Brook University with a liberal arts degree and a minor in psychology she needed a job. And Pan American World Airways was hiring.
“I spoke Dutch,” recalled Helliger, who was raised in Brooklyn but born on the island of St. Martin. “And back in those days, you had to speak another language. Pan Am was an international carrier, and you had to be fluent in another language in order to be a flight attendant.”
She stayed with Pan Am until Delta bought the airline. By then she was married and commuting to John F. Kennedy International Airport. Again, she needed a job and started selling insurance on commission. One of her clients happened to be the Bridgeport Police Department.
“A couple of the guys in Bridgeport said, ‘You know what, you’d make a good cop!’ And I was like, ‘Get outta here! Good cop? Oh, no.’ Being a police officer was the last thing I was thinking about.”
The Bridgeport officers insisted she take the test. So she did. New Haven’s department was hiring.
“The insurance business was kind of tough because it was all based on commission,” she said. “So I said, ‘OK, I’ll try it.’
“Actually, because I was writing insurance for them, I had an idea of what they were making, and I thought ‘That’s not bad money.’”
Helliger also was intrigued with a concept that New Haven’s then police chief, Nick Pastore, was introducing, called community policing.
“Being raised in New York, there was never a good relationship between police and individuals,” she recalled. “If you see a cop, you never get a conversation with them, and if they’re in the community, it is usually because of something bad. [In New York] cops weren’t coming into the community to say, ‘Hi, how are you doing? When I heard about the community-based policing initiative under Chief Pastore I was like, ‘I would like to try that.’”
Making Her Mark
Markeshia Ricks Photo
After completing the academy, Helliger walked the beat in Newhallville, where she “adopted” a family with whom she still keeps ties with to this day. Her connection to this family that sparked the idea to create a “safe surrender” warrant program that helped clean up a backlog on warrants and allow people to in her words “come out of the shadows” and clean up old warrants. Last year more than 500 people with outstanding warrants turned themselves in.
Helliger also spearheaded the Building Horizons Through Cultural Diversity program, which connected New Haven police officers who were born in other countries to students at Lincoln Bassett. And she continues to remain active with the Mae Ola Reddick Foundation, which is named in honor of the woman she said mentored her and showed her how to be more than a police officer in the community, but to truly be a part of the community.
Helliger is a trained instructor in Kingian nonviolence.
Helliger said the city could attract more black female cops, and more minority cops in general, through mentoring, especially of young women and girls. She said many women are afraid of the job because they think it involves mostly being shot at. While that can happen, that’s not the bulk of police work, she noted.
“We have to get a better connection although we are pretty good at it,” she said. “But I think that we really need to do a better job. It’s just like a lot of officers become officers —its because their fathers and their brothers and their uncles are cops. We need to bring the kids into the police department and let them see that I have an office, and there are different kinds of jobs within the department.”
Hit play to hear the speech Helliger gave Friday.
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