Cops Shed Light On Complaints

City cops investigated 82 complaints against local officers last year. Twelve complaints were sustained, leading to discipline.

The department’s Internal Affairs division chief has begun publicizing those numbers in an effort to increase transparency around the number and results of complaints lodged against police.

Lt. David Zannelli shared those numbers, and that new New Haven Police Department (NHPD) transparency initiative, at this month’s regular meeting of the Fair Haven Community Management Team. Roughly three dozen neighbors filled the Grand Avenue library branch’s basement conference room this past Thursday night for the meeting.

Zannelli, who took the reins of the department’s Internal Affairs (IA) division after around serving 15 months as Fair Haven’s top cop, announced that his small team of police investigators recently started sharing data on the city website regarding civilian complaints and chief-ordered investigations into alleged officer misconduct. He said he will be making the rounds of various community management teams to share the data, and update neighbors on what IA is up to.

“So it gives everybody in the public an idea that when you make a complaint, it just doesn’t disappear into oblivion,” he said. ​“That’s a result that comes of it.”

Click here to review the complaint data.

Zannelli said his division has started experimenting with posting complaint information to the city website just in the past few weeks. Over the past two years, he said, recently retired Chief Anthony Campbell instituted a department policy of posting all nonsensitive general orders (that is, orders that do not relate to terrorism, active shooter responses, and officer safety) to the city website.

“We do that for transparency,” he said. ​“A lot of people don’t know that.”

As now reported on the city website, Zannelli explained, the department received 82 complaints against local police officers in 2018. Sixty-one of those complaints came from civilians. Twenty-one came from the chief.

Twelve of those complaints were sustained and led to officer discipline by the chief; 51 were either unfounded or withdrawn or resulted in the officer’s exoneration; 16 are still being investigated; and three led to mandated counseling or extra training,

“A lot of it comes down to just showing the public the results of these complaints,” he said. ​“Here’s the breakdown. They don’t just disappear into nowhere.”

After the meeting, Zannelli dived deeper with this report into how his division works.

When a civilian has a complaint with an officer’s alleged misconduct, he said, that person can submit a civilian complaint form, or send an email to the department, or communicate it via telephone. ​“We take it anonymously,” Zannelli said about civilian complaints.

When the department receives a complaint, Zannelli and his team evaluate its seriousness and then either delegate the response to the relevant district commander, or open a formal investigation.

Either way, he said, the division reaches out to the complainant by phone or by certified mail or in person to let that person know that the complaint has been received.

Due to the department’s union contract, Zannelli said, IA must complete its investigation into an officer complaint within 90 days. The only way to extend that time period is through a direct order from the chief.

Zannelli said that body camera footage has emerged as a critical piece of evidence in complaint investigations since the department started rolling them out in late 2017. Per the department’s general orders, officers must have their body cameras turned on during all interactions with civilians except if their is a health privacy concern or if the officer is responding to an apparent crime in progress.

“It’s reassuring to know that in the vast majority of complaints we can show the body camera footage,” he said. ​“It’s not just the police’s words. It’s technology in use.”

Zannelli said that body camera footage has been ​“paramount in exonerating officers” so far, often revealing that an officer did not curse at or mistreat a civilian in the way that that civilian may have felt at the moment.

But the camera footage goes both ways, he said. In a recent instance where three officers neglected to arrest an alleged serial rapist and mistreated a woman who had been apparently sexually assaulted under threat of violence, the camera footage showed clearly that the officers were in the wrong and needed to be punished.

“They faced supreme discipline,” he said. ​“We’re not just proposing that it protects cops.”

In most cases, Zannelli said, complaints arise out of a civilian feeling that an officer has been rude with him or her. In a minority of cases, he said, complaints involve accusations of abuse of force.

Zannelli was asked why his division shares only the complaint data and not any context on which officers have been accused and for what. He responded that the closed cases are accessible through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. ​“If there’s a public interest of a complainant that wants to know the full issues of the investigation,” he said, that information can be FOI’d. The department does not release information on open investigations, he said.

So far this yaer, Zannelli said, the department has received 20 complaints against officers. ​“I want to say we’re on the same trend we’ve been on these past few years,” he said. He noted that last year did see an uptick in complaints regarding off-duty domestic violence charges levied against five different officers.

“That is a rarity,” he said. ​“We haven’t seen a spike in that” so far in 2019.