Defunding Debate Shifts To The Doors

Josh Elliott was holding a stack of campaign flyers calling for defunding police when he asked voter Craig Wiehler what issues concern him.

“I would like,” said Wiehler, ​“to not see the police defunded.”

Wiehler was standing in his driveway in Hamden, and Elliott was walking down his street knocking on doors in a Tuesday afternoon canvass of one of the neighborhoods in his 88th State House district.

Elliott, a Democrat and owner of food stores Thyme and Season in Hamden and The Common Bond Market in Shelton and one of the legislature’s most progressive voices, is running for a third term as state representative.

His opponent, Republican Kathy Hoyt, had walked the exact same streets just half an hour before him.

Wiehler’s response gave Elliott exactly what he said he sought when he decided to include defunding language on his flyer: the opportunity for a conversation.

“I’m running on defunding language, but I want to explain what that means to me,” Elliott began. It doesn’t mean eliminating the police. If you take a dollar from the police and use it to fund social services, that’s a form of defunding, he said. Plus, if a husband and wife are having a dispute, it likely will not help to have someone show up at the door with a gun.

Wiehler disagreed. Domestic calls are some of the most dangerous calls police officers deal with, he said. It would put a social worker in danger to go to a domestic call without protection.

If you come to a dispute with a gun, that escalates the situation, replied Elliott. Rather than add firepower to the argument, the first person to respond would be someone who is trained in de-escalation and does not appear to be a threat. If need be, they could call for backup.

Wiehler was not convinced.

The conversation turned to the recent police accountability bill that Elliott supported in the House in July. Both agreed that the bill that ended up passing was not very intrusive for cops.

“People should feel safe. Feel like they’re being protected,” and that doesn’t necessarily mean having more cops, said Elliott. He bid Wiehler farewell and continued down the street.

It was not the first conversation about defunding that Elliott had with a voter that day. It was not the first time he found himself explaining why he is running on defunding language.

About an hour earlier, he had stopped to talk to a voter who, though she seemed to agree with many of the details of defunding, brought up the subject by saying she didn’t like the framing.

“I think it starts the conversation,” Elliott replied. There is a lot of fear around the defunding verbiage, he said. When people hear it, ​“they shut down.” By coming to people’s doors and talking about it, he said, he seeks to have a nuanced conversation about what it means and think about the reasons people advocate for drastic changes to the American policing system.

He is not advocating for elimination of the police, he told the voter (who declined to give her name).

People often say he and other defunding proponents are attacking the police.

“No, we’re attacking the systems that allow bad people to get away with doing bad things,” he said.

As he walked away from the house, having just gotten the voter to agree to put a lawn sign in her yard, Elliott explained why he thinks it’s important to include defunding language in his platform.

There is only so much the state legislature itself can actually do to change policing systems, he said. There are limits to what the state can and cannot tell municipalities to do when it comes to policing. Talking about defunding, he said, is more about using his position to ask the question: ​“Do we need as many cops as we have? Would we be better off putting more resources into social services?”

Crimes are most often the result of deprivation and socioeconomic hardship, he said, and not the result of a lack of policing.

“It’s all part of this ethos of ​‘lift up the base and everyone will benefit,’” he said. ​“If you focus on the underlying problems, you don’t need as much police.”

That doesn’t fit neatly into a campaign slogan, and politics is not always a great venue for nuance. ​“But I will talk with someone where they’re at… My goal is to nudge them along that path” toward thinking about keeping communities safe by addressing the underlying problems rather than turning to more police, he said.

His views stem from the belief that ​“for the most part, people are good, and people are just resource starved.”

“I Support Hamden Police 100%”

Earlier, Hoyt was asked about the recent police accountability bill when she knocked on the same doors.

“You mean the one my opponent slept through?” she began.

Elliott got to the state Capitol at 9:30 a.m. the day of the debate and then scheduled vote on the police accountability bill. He posted on Facebook the next day. He had arranged for his neighbor to take his dog out at 5:30 p.m. The debate on the accountability bill didn’t start until 1:30 a.m. By 4 a.m., Elliott wrote, he realized the debate would last many more hours and his dog needed to be let out and fed. He drove home, took the dog out, and fell asleep, accidentally with his ringer off.

While he was away, Republicans introduced an amendment that would have stripped language on qualified immunity out of the bill. Democrats ended up defeating the amendment with a tied 72 – 72 vote — the vote that Elliott missed, though his presence and vote in favor would not have changed the outcome. He was back at the Capitol by the time the House voted on the overall bill later in the morning.

Elliott pointed out that he had a 100 percent voting record in 2017, 98 percent in 2018, and 97 percent in 2019.

As she walked, meanwhile Hoyt continued giving her thoughts on policing.

“I support the Hamden police 100 percent,” she said. ​“I think they do a great job keeping us safe. My opponent stated that he wanted to defund the police. Especially now, in the last three months, we have seen such an uptick in crime in Hamden. People coming in and robbing women at gunpoint in the middle of the afternoon.”

She was referring to an incident on Sept. 8 when a group of young men threatened a woman in Hamden Plaza with a gun, pepper sprayed her, and stole her car.

Especially in a time when incidents like that are happening, she said, it would be a bad idea to defund the police.

(As the FBI recently reported, murders are up nationwide, but the rates of most other crimes are down.)

Hoyt said she would not have voted for the police accountability bill.

“I understand that components of the bill create greater transparency. I understand that there need to be necessities like that. But at this time, I do not believe we need to defund the police,” she said.

The bill did not include defunding measures. It increased requirements of departments and limited the use of governmental immunity, the state-level version of the legal defense qualified immunity, which is often used to prevent cops from being sued for misconduct. Republicans argue that the bill increases the costs of running police departments because of its mandates for training, cameras, evaluations, and other checks. That, they say, de facto defunds departments because it could mean they will be able to afford fewer officers.

Hoyt said there are parts of the bill she would have supported, like increased requirements for training and requirements for psychiatric evaluations for cops.

Hoyt also said she thinks police unions are too strong, and have too much power to protect cops who break rules. ​“It should be one and done,” she said. ​“You screw up, you’re done. These union contracts, they need to be reopened.”

But, she reiterated, she supports Hamden police ​“100 percent.”

“Didn’t we just have 9/11?” she asked. ​“How did we forget so quickly.” Police officers ran into the burning buildings to save people inside, and many officers died. ​“That’s what the officers in Hamden do every day, and it appears people have forgotten that,” she said.

Change

As Hoyt walked, she pointed out the various features of the houses she liked. She is a realtor and does business in Hamden. She said she loves noticing the details of houses while she’s out canvassing.

“People put so much time, effort, and thought into making their houses beautiful, and I hear time and time and time again, ​‘I’m never going to get my money back,’” she said as she approached one house. ​“Change. People want change.”

She said people are tired of the high tax rates in Connecticut. ​“The government has its hand out constantly,” she said.

Hoyt glanced over at a stucco house framed by a smattering of bushes. ​“Isn’t this house lovely?” she remarked. ​“It looks like an English cottage.”

She continued walking along the pavement. ​“Careful,” she said, pointing to a place where one of the paving blocks had been forced up by a tree root.

Hoyt said the legislature needs to figure out what money is being spent on so it can cut down on its costs.

Second, she said, the government structure could change. ​“I think a lot of government could be streamlined. I think a lot of government is top heavy,” she said.

Elliott said he certainly does not fault Hoyt for running on a change platform. He too ran on a platform that touted change when he first sought his seat in 2016. And now, in the legislature, he, too, is looking for some changes.

His main priority in the next session, if he is reelected reelected, will be a bill he has had in the works before to make telephone calls free for prisoners. Phone rates in Connecticut are prohibitively expensive for inmates.

Another goal, he said, is changing tax structures to make them more equitable. That would mean raising the rates on top income earners in the state. The income tax, he said, is the only potentially non-regressive tax the state has at its disposal.

He said he is also hoping to help push a bill, with Senate President Pro Tem. Martin Looney, that would create a statewide 1 mill property tax. The tax would include a homestead exemption that would make up to a certain dollar amount non-taxable if taxpayers live in the building being taxed. That would mean many lower-income homeowners with less expensive properties would not have to pay the tax, or would have to pay very little of it.

The revenue would be used to fund the payment in lieu of taxes (PILOT) program that reimburses municipalities for the lost tax revenue they would receive from certain non-taxable properties like educational institutions, hospitals, houses of worship, and state-owned property. Though PILOT is supposed to reimburse municipalities up to 77 percent of their lost revenue, it is extremely rare for a municipality to receive that much. Under the new proposal that Elliott said he would like to see, any municipality with at least 10 percent affordable housing would get the maximum PILOT reimbursement rate, while other municipalities would get lower reimbursement rates based on their percentages of affordable housing.

Fully funding the PILOT program would reap significant financial rewards for New Haven and Hamden, in which a relatively high percentage of properties are tax exempt.

Hoyt and Elliott will face off in the Nov. 3 general election.