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Chief Tony Reyes: We want to be associated with healing.
In the past, New Haven cops might not have known what to say to a 5‑year-old who keeps watching television while they put his dad in handcuffs for bruising his mom.
Now, thanks to a new training program created with the Yale Child Study Center, after decades of studying local officers at work, an officer would know they could sit down at eye level with the child, teach them breathing techniques to calm down and ask if they have a plan next time something happens.
Seventeen cops received certificates at the department’s Union Avenue headquarters this past Friday morning, vouching that they had completed the one-day training in the Yale Child Study Center’s toolkit, known as “Enhancing Police Responses to Children Exposed to Violence.”
Those strategies will come in handy whenever an officer responds to a sexual assault, domestic violence, physical abuse, car wrecks or death notifications, among other calls.
The training builds on the department’s existing partnerships with the Department of Children and Families and the Yale Child Study Center, who provide clinicians to address trauma.
Interim Chief Otoniel Reyes said that the department is committed to mitigating trauma throughout the city, especially in cases where officers themselves played a role in causing it.
“We’re guardians as well as warriors,” Reyes said. “The uniform, when we talk about a traumatic experience, has often been associated with that trauma. Our presence there, unbeknownst to us that we know now, has been part of the trauma for children and families. We’ve tried to change that optic. We realize that police also have the best opportunity to stop that trauma. We want to be associated with help and healing, and I think that’s what this achieves.”
Steven Marans: It’s natural to look away from others’ pain.
Trauma begins with a feeling of helplessness as a person’s worst fears are realized, said Steven Marans, a psychiatry professor at the Yale Child Study Center who co-wrote the curriculum. “Part of the brain that is responsible for making decisions goes offline in the wake of overwhelming nightmare scenarios,” he explained. These techniques slow down the body and give back some control, he said.
Marans added that when responders themselves don’t know what to do in the face of others’ pain, it’s a human impulse to turn away. He said that he hopes these specific strategies make cops feel more effective too, rather than overwhelmed themselves.
Trauma-informed policing also has crime-fighting benefits, officers said. They said they hope the strategies can off-set the traumas that researchers know often leads to increased risk of addiction, unsafe sex, miscarriages, depression, suicide attempts, and other health problems as adults — the types of behavior that could put them at risk of running into cops again.
“We see these children often. We see them later on in life, and we’re able to say, ‘Huh, something probably happened at a point in their life that maybe put them on a trajectory to being involved in the criminal justice system,’” said Lt. Renee Dominguez. “If we can teach officers to stop and take a minute, they may be at that point where they’re able to change that trajectory, to have that first understanding that the child is struggling and offer some sort of assistance, even if it’s just coloring with them.”
Osvaldo Garcia, with his certificate from the child-trauma training.
Officer Osvaldo Garcia said that even before the formal training, he’d picked up techniques from watching a Yale Child Study Center clinician at work alongside him. He said those helped him interact with children who were in the midst of a crisis.
“A lot of these kids, after situations like that, their daily lives change a little bit. They’ll go to school, and their minds are constantly replaying what happened,” he said. “We give them techniques to help, when that anxiety kicks in, to calm them down.”
Garcia said that he starts off by asking kids about their interests, just to make them comfortable talking. Then, he’ll teach them lessons about how to breathe and how to prepare in case there’s another traumatic event.
However, Garcia said that kids can be wary of police, whom they might associate only with locking up their parents.
“When I come in, sometimes they’ll ask questions, like, ‘Why is a cop here?’ They ask, ‘What’s going to happen? What are you doing next?’” he said. “There’s times where we’ll show up to a home and mom and dad are fighting. The traumatic thing, of course, is to see them getting arrested, and they’ll associate that with the police. We try to change their perspective.”
The first cops to take the course, who will now be training the rest of the department over the next several months, are Lts. Renee Dominguez, Manmeet Colon, Steve Torquati, Mark O’Neill and Jason Rentkowicz; Sgts. Mike Fumiatti, Dana Smith, Bert Etienne; Det. Liz White; and Offs. Eduardo Leonardo, Osvaldo Garcia, Jocelyn Lavandier, Endi Dragoi, Chris Rinaldi, Steven Spofford, Christian Bruckhart and Matthew Borges.