Clamont Arrignton, in the black T-shirt, told of his recent “rude” encounter with cops.
Do cops ever get forget on which hip they wear the taser and on which the revolver?
In the current climate of retaliation against cops, is being a female black officer a measure of protection?
Why does it appear a black person’s death is “littler” than a police officer’s as conveyed in the media?
And is there brutality in the New Haven police department?
Officer Knox wtih 12-year-old Richlyn Bronson, who said she has been researching police brutality, online, on her own.
Those questions emerged Monday in a frank conversation between teens and the police, as the police union and the Boys and Girls Club of New Haven sponsored a get-to-know-you event in the wake of this summer’s violence by and against the police, and the morning-to-night social media that obsessively covers it.
About 25 kids and a slew of police officers including Newhallville District Manager Sgt. Shafiq Abdusabbur and North and Hill South District Managers Lts. Brandon Hosey and Jason Minardi gathered in a comfortable air-conditioned room of the club.
They were there both to answer the kids’ prepared questions about all the violence they’re viewing and, perhaps more importantly, to have them sit shoulder-to-shoulder with officers and get to know them as people, not, as Det. Shayna Kendall put it, “a lump of blue.”
A case in point: Clamont Arrington, who’s 16, came seeking an explanation of why he and three innocently basketball-playing friends were, in Clamont’s description, two days ago rudely cuffed by the cops who were seeking four other kids and were not even apologized to when they were released 30 minutes later. But before he asked the question, in the socializing before the session, Clamont noticed Kendall’s make-up.
Det. Kendall of the Special Victims Unit with 13-year-old James Young/
“Your eyebrows are fleek,” Kendall paraphrased Clamont’s compliment. She said such side-conversations are as important as the cops’ full answers’ to the kids’ prepared queries that followed for a candid two hours.
The gathering came about when the club’s Executive Director Stephanie Barnes noticed how frequently the kids were viewing on their phones the coverage of the summer’s police killings of black men and the retaliatory attacks on officers around the country.
“We were trying to figure out how they were processing [this]. What’s going through their minds,” she said.
Abdussabur on the right, with police union chief Craig Miller, on the left, who helped present the gift to the club.
One of the club’s senior counselors, Brittany Roberts, put the issue clinically: “It’s unhealthy seeing it everywhere on social media. They’re [the kids] getting accustomed, as the norm. That’s what concerns me. They grow up thinking it’s the norm.”
Barnes reached out to Abdussabur and to Jillian Knox, who for years has been the department’s victim services officer.
Officer Totino explains the taser/gun question, up close.
Abdussabur, the treasurer of the police union, brought in not only the bevy of other officers, some on vacation or off duty, but a sumptuous lunch of chicken and cornbread, a pretext for the kids to chat informally with officers over a meal.
In addition the union presented $2,000 in scholarship support to the club. It’s the largest gift the union has ever made to a New Haven organization, he said.
Lt. Minardi compliments John Alston on his Teenage Ninja Turtles fashion choice.
These kids, many of them relatively young teens, had concerns not only because of seeing violence on the media but also because of experiencing it themselves. One student asked about why some cops are rude to citizens.
From day one at the training academy, Hosey said, officers are urged to treat citizens fairly and justly. But sometimes that’s in your character and not totally within the reach of teaching, he said.
Speaking personally, Hosey added, “Even when you arrest someone, you can make a friend. I arrest someone, and maybe six months later I may help you out.”
Rudeness by police was part but not all of a personal issue that Clamont Arrington brought up when he described how a cruiser pulled up behind him and his three friends two days ago as they were finishing up the last of a series of basketball games on the courts behind the Roberto Clemente Leadership Academy.
Within a half hour the police found the four young black men who had been reported robbing in the area, he said. He said the arriving officers didn’t take at face value Arrington’s explanation that they were just playing basketball. After the initial conversation, when, according to Clamont, they were compliant, the boys began walking away; yet the officers detained them, cuffed them, and made them sit on the curb until the matter was resolved.
“If you see young black men, boys playing basketball, in sweats, sweating, with a ball, there’s no need to cuff them,” Clamont said.
“I don’t know about that report,” Hosey responded. He said officers are trained to respond to the call they receive — and if the call is to look for four black young men, then asking Clamont and his friends did not seem unreasonable.
Hosey, in answer to other questions about police behavior captured on video, urged the assembled kids not to rush to judgement. What happened in the 20 seconds before what’s caught on videotape? he said rhetorically. He urged the kids to do their research into the situations and not rush to judgment
Adah.
Officer Knox told her questioner, 16-year-old Camryn Shaw, that she felt as much a “target” as male officers. “We wear a uniform, a gun, we have arrest powers.”
In response to another question about taser use versus use of the regular police revolver, Officer Dave Totino stood up and showed the kids close up, “Your taser is always on your non-dominant hand.”
“How is it if cops get confused?” Brittany Roberts pressed him.
“It’s muscle memory. We’re trained never to shoot with the non-dominant hand,” he replied.
Barnes let out a not very well-kept secret: that many of the kids in the club are guilty of stereotyping the police, thinking of them as “one,” not knowing officers or individuating. Indeed, when some of the kids heard that officers were coming to the event, they expressed misgivings. The misgivings were pretty soon brushed aside by the relaxed company and good food.
New Haven Family Alliance Executive Director Barbara Tinney asked if the community might be guilty of stereotyping the cops, could the cops address their potential stereotyping of the community.
“You have to watch against it,” Hosey responded, and then told a personal story of one of his early beats. “I was assigned to a black housing project. It took me a while to realize there are 300 units, and just three or four are problems, and the others are great.” He admitted that when he told people about the assignment, “others who don’t go into the neighborhood assume” the worst.
When the gathering wrapped up, Hosey pronounced it useful. He said he has frequently done this get-to-know you exercise before at high schools around the city and other venues.
Adiah Moore and 14-year-old Kejuan Simmons said they both felt a little more comfortable and protected as a result of the gathering.
The feeling was not universal. Emerald Foreman, a 15-year-old incoming dance student to the Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School, said she felt the life of a black man killed by police somehow “littler” than a police officers. “When you hear about a black person being killed, it is littler. You’re so used to it. I think it [the media treatment] should be equal,” she added.
She pronounced the “conversation” “good,” but insufficient. “Action should be behind it. The group [talk] is okay, but not enough.”