File Photos
DuBois-Walton (left): Support Officer McKernan. Elicker (center): Officers tried to “de-escalate.” Antunes (right): Suspend Officer Cole.
Gerald Antunes watched a police officer grab a man’s head and punch him in the head. He watched a policewoman step in to stop the pummeling.
Antunes thought back to when he, too, stopped a fellow officer from hitting a suspect.
Antunes, a retired New Haven police captain, chairs the Board of Alders’ Public Safety Committee
Like other police-watchers in town, he was concerned as he reviewed the lengthy body-camera videos released this week of how officers handled a call last Friday at the Connecticut Financial Center office tower on Church Street. The officers responded to a call related to an eviction dispute between a tenant and management. After over an hour of frustrating conversation, two officers pinned the man to the ground while arresting him. The unarmed man kicked at the cops. Officer Justin Cole pepper-sprayed the man. He grabbed his throat. He started punching the man in the head until Officer Ashley McKernan rushed over, held Cole’s arm, then helped the tenant wash out his eyes and calm down. (The police body cam video at the top of the story shows two key moments at issue in this case: Marshall kicking at 2:40; Cole punching at 2:50.)
Police Chief Otoniel Reyes has ordered an internal investigation into the incident. (Click here for a story detailing the incident, and here for a detailed account of the hour-plus encounter that led up to it.)
Meanwhile, the videos have prompted debate in town about what kind of policing New Haven wants to have. The office tower incident raised questions about what kinds of call cops should respond to, how they should respond, what constitutes justifiable force, how to deal with people facing mental or emotional challenges, and what it means to escalate or de-escalate tense situations.
The Time To Strike
NHPD
Officer Cole with hands around Marshall’s neck.
Some fellow cops have rallied to Cole’s defense. In comments to previous Independent stories on the case, they criticized McKernan for not acting tougher against a recalcitrant man. “Ofc Cole was well within his legal right to strike an arrestee that was actively fighting him,” wrote one commenter, who called McKernan a “scared cop hop[ping] around while her fellow officers were fighting an uncooperative arrestee.” (Police union President Florencio Cotto declined to respond to requests for comment for this article.)
Antunes and other prominent cop-watchers in town drew the opposite conclusion from the police commenters. They praised McKernan for stepping in. And they struggled to see justification for Officer Cole’s actions.
“The head punch seems to me out of place. That was completely wrong,” Antunes said in an interview. “You’ve got two cops holding him down. Why do you need to hit him in the head? Why do you have to hit him?” If the held-down man is kicking, Antunes said, “sit on his legs.”
Officer Ashley McKernan.
“The female officer did the right thing. She went over to stop him,” he continued. “I did that one time myself. I had to stop a cop from hitting somebody.”
His case occurred in the 1980s, after a fight broke out on Hamilton Street.
“Police were called. Officers went over there. I was the sergeant on duty, so I went,” Antunes recalled.
“They were putting a man in the back seat of the police car. He was saying, ‘What am I being arrested for?’ The cop said, ‘Shut up and get in the car.’ ‘What am I being arrested for?’
“The cop went to swing at the guy. I just grabbed his arm and stopped it. I said, ‘Tell the guy what he’s charged with.’
“He told him. And the guy got in the car, no problem.”
Antunes said cops should never have been dealing with an eviction disagreement in the first place last Friday. Watching the extensive body cam-recorded conversations that led up to the fight, Antunes said, he saw an officer — Cole — misread the situation in terms of how to deal with an emotionally disturbed person. Instead, Cole “created a problem” by acting defensively and confrontationally.
A third officer on the scene was a rookie assigned to train with Cole. “He’s an FTO [field training officer]! And you’re doing that? What’s the new cop gonna think?” Antunes added. Antunes said the chief should suspend Cole.
“The guy’s got to get suspended. He’s got to go through some kind of nonviolent training, deescalation training,” agreed the Rev. Boise Kimber, who has organized recent press conferences about local policing with other clergy of color.
Another minister involved in policing issues, the Rev. Steven Cousin, said he wants to wait for the investigation to conclude before weighing in on potential consequences.
But “I do not like what I saw,” Cousin, a member of the state’s Police Accountability & Transparency Task Force, said of the body camera footage. He said the incident shows that “although we made great strides to build trust in the community, there’s still much work to do” in New Haven’s police department.
“Watching the video, you are going to be triggered as an African-American in this society. We pray that events like this won’t happen in our neighborhood,” said Cousin, who is African-American. “I understand the kicking that occurred with the gentleman not wanting to be arrested. The officers did have the guy restrained. The three blows to the head were concerning to me.”
“I do commend the female officer for intervening and for de-escalating the situation,” Cousin added.
DuBois-Walton: “Send A Message”
Thomas Breen File Photo
Top cops take a knee at a Black Lives Matter protest last summer, pledging police accountability.
If the internal investigation concludes that Cole was following department rules and training — then those rules and that training need to be changed, argued Karen DuBois-Walton.
DuBois-Walton, who currently serves as executive director of the city’s housing authority, has decades of firsthand experience with New Haven’s efforts to reform policing. In the 1990s, she worked among the psychologists at the Yale Child Study Center pioneering a partnership with the New Haven police to help young people who experience violence. She oversaw the police department as chief administrative officer a decade later. Then she served as mayoral chief of staff.
“I don’t think it is ever appropriate to be punching somebody in the head in an attempt to subdue them. If the review reveals that was done within appropriate police protocol, I think those protocols should be revisited,” DuBois-Walton argued in an interview.
As she watched the body-cam video, DuBois-Walton saw a teachable moment for a community wrestling with how it should be policed.
For starters, she said, police should never have been called to deal with an eviction dispute. There are other agencies that deal with those.
Pre-Pandemic File Photo
Officer Justin Cole on the downtown beat.
And the female officer showed the way to speak “like a human being” with the arrestee, Shawn Marshall, DuBois-Walton argued.
“You don’t have to be a psychologist to understand early in the story that you were dealing with a person who was having a crisis issue … This was a moment [that] needed the skills of deescalation and crisis management and humane interaction more than it needed armed police force.”
DuBois-Walton also applauded Officer McKernan for intervening. That was one of the calls from last summer’s protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis while fellow officers watched: Cops should step in to save detainees’ lives. Even if that means crossing the thin blue line.
The police department should support McKernan for taking action and “send a message” that she “did the right thing,” DuBois-Walton added.
“The police chief came out strongly and folks stood in front of the police department and retook their pledge after George Floyd. We want to be a different police department now. We don’t want to be a police department where we don’t stand by and watch something go wrong.”
Elicker Cites Officers’ “De-escalation”
“My impression after seeing the video was that the officers spent an incredible amount of time trying to deescalate the situation” and get Marshall to leave the building peacefully, Mayor Justin Elicker told the Independent Thursday.
He added that at first glance, “the body camera footage is concerning. But we need to make sure the process of the internal affairs investigation takes its course. I’m reluctant to get into my own assessment of every individual thing that happened there.”
Elicker was asked whether McKernan was right or wrong to step in and stop Cole from continuing to punch Marshall in the head.
“Efforts by any officer to de-escalate or show compassion shouldn’t be criticized,” he responded.
“This is an opportunity for us to talk about the bigger-picture issues around what circumstances merit a police response —in this case it was a civil matter — and whether there might be an appropriate group of individuals who can respond.”