Youth Leaders Renew Call To Defund The Police

Nearly 100 protesters marched from the Green to police headquarters to issue a renewed call to defund the police.

That rally took place Friday afternoon, and was organized by Citywide Youth Coalition and Black Lives Matter New Haven.

Echoing calls the same youth organizers issued in June when the two local racial justice organizations turned out 5,000 people to fill city streets, Friday’s demonstrators formed a wall of bodies that blocked off several traffic lanes.

As they marched, they chanted: ​“No justice, no police. Take to the streets. Defund the police.”

The protest took place on the same day that Gov. Ned Lamont signed into law a far-ranging police accountability bill that New Haven State Sen. Gary Winfield successfully shepherded through the state legislature in the wake of two months of local, statewide, and national protests against police brutality.

The marchers’ demands were the same as in June. They called on the city to remove police officers from schools, reduce the New Haven Police Department budget from $43 million to $10 million, reinvest the money in the public education system, reallocate $20 million from police pensions to create affordable public housing, and prosecute every officer in Connecticut who has been involved in the killing of or acts of violence against civilians.

No police were in sight as the protesters arrived on the steps of the police headquarters at 1 Union Ave. Speakers ranging from seasoned activist Ala Ochumare, who co-founded Black Lives Matter New Haven, to younger advocates like Kira Ortoleva, whose best friend Mubarak Soulemane was killed by state police in January, spoke to a crowd of 90 for over an hour.

High schooler after high schooler argued that school resource officers (SROs) are a waste of funds in an underfunded school district. They said they are also a hostile force that disproportionately targets black and brown students. The Board of Education is currently locked in a debate about the future of school cops due to be resolved in August. A group of former SROs, meanwhile, are also organizing to preserve their former jobs on the grounds that cops in schools are able to form unique bonds of trust and authority with students.

Mellody Massaquoi, 17, puffed on her asthma inhaler as she chanted with her peers.

“You don’t have a nurse at school every day, yet you have a police because they is more necessary than my health? That’s not okay,” she said. She pointed out how schools do not have sufficient mental health counselors, yet manage to have a cop who pats the students down each day when they enter.

“I’ve been in New Haven Public Schools all my life and I’ve had SROs in my high school. I can tell you that they do not prevent altercations from happening,” said Jamila Washington, a Citywide Youth Coalition organizer. She said officers deliberately take longer to pat down black students.

“The safety and control they’re supposed to bring schools is a fallacy,” said 16-year-old Hill native Lihame Arouna, who is a student representative on the Board of Education. ​“This can be backed up by multiple studies. This can be backed by the students in our schools. All of us are tired of being policed in schools.”

At one point, a man in a car drove by and flashed the middle finger at the protesters, who called for him to get out of his car. He ignored them and whizzed away. But many more vehicles tooted their horns in solidarity as they drove past, thrusting their fists out of the window and chanting, ​“No justice no peace.”

“We have years and years of history of trauma and we need help,” said Ta’Lanna Monique ​“T’Mo” Miller. ​“We don’t need prisons. We don’t need jails. That’s what we’re talking about when we talk about defund the police,” She recalled how her daughter attended school in Westport, which is ​“very rich, very white”.

“They don’t have trauma. They can call services in schools. If the kids have an issue they can go talk to someone, a guidance counselor. When they have problems at home, the teachers actually care. Why don’t we have that here?” she asked. ​“Let’s defund the police and get the help we need. Do you expect boys and girls to come to school when they’re hungry?”

She directly addressed accusations that activists calling to defund the police just want the neighborhood to become ​“crime-infested” or a ​“Wild West”. ​“We’re talking about actual solutions to actual problems,” she said.

The crowd fell silent as 19-year-old Ortoleva spoke about her deceased friend. ​“I have to watch his death over and over and over again because the entire death cam footage is on Youtube posted by Fox 61. Nothing about this is okay,” she said. A sign she carried bore the names of other civilians who had been killed by the police in Connecticut: Jayson Negron, Anthony Vega Cruz, Vincent Fowlkes, Jarelle Gibbs, Steven Barrier.

On January 15, Ortoleva was getting ready to meet her significant other when she received a call from a friend who told her, ​“They killed him.” At first, she did not believe that the police had shot her closest friend of four years, Mubarak Soulemane. But then the name was released on the news. She dropped to her knees and started crying.

“The police are not supposed to kill guilty people and the police are not supposed to kill innocent people and yet they do both,” she said at the protest.

Ortoleva remembered Soulemane as ​“always smiling”. She used to meet him between classes under the Fairway at Gateway Community College, where they were both second-year students. They would talk about everything from how their day was going, to Soulemane’s ambitions of starting a clothing business, to deep questions about spirituality and religion (Soulemane was Muslim and Ortoleva is Wiccan.)

“I wasn’t able to eat or sleep for the first week afterward. It still is hard for me to do that now,” Ortoleva told the Independent after the rally. ​“The nightmares were bad in the beginning. I would wake up screaming or wake up throwing up. But I reminded myself that if he was here, he wouldn’t want to see me doing that. He’d rather see me out in the streets and making political leadership change.”

The police need to be trained to recognize the signs of mental health episodes, Ortoleva said. Mubarak was schizophrenic. She said it was frustrating that the city and state mental health services are so severely underfunded while the police budget receives $40 million each year.

The sun sank deeper into Friday evening and Ochumare led the crowd, who had gathered cross-legged around her and the other speakers in a semi-circle, in a final call-and-response chant.

“The mandate for black people in this time,” she said as demonstrators echoed after her, ​“is to avenge the suffering of our ancestors. To earn the respect of future generations and to be willing to be transformed in the service of this work.”

As crowd slowly dissipated, Ortoleva sat on the steps of the police headquarters and showed this reporter a black panther tattoo inked into her forearm in honor of Mubarak Soulemane.

“He was kind of like our own little light. He was like our black panther,” she said. ​“He no longer has a voice. He is no longer with us. He only exists in pictures and videos now. So in a way, for me to be able to keep his light alive, I follow his morals, I uplift his religion and his family. And I’m able to keep his story alive.”

Click on the below videos to watch parts of Friday’s march.