New Havener Of The Week

When Kerry Ellington first learned that police had shot at two unarmed people in Newhallville, she didn’t hold a press conference. She started organizing.

She tapped into a decade’s worth of carefully cultivated community contacts via phone, email, and Facebook. She got the word out that People against Policy Brutality and other local police accountability groups would take to the streets to demand answers from the police and justice for the victims.

Within hours, Dixwell Avenue was filled with hundreds of angry and grieving protesters.

In the middle of those crowds stood Ellington, not with a microphone and a podium, but with a megaphone and a list of demands: for the release of body camera footage, for the firing of the officers involved, for structural policing reforms at all levels of government. Playing a role she has developed over a decade of social-justice organizing in New Haven that offers an outside alternative to the city’s traditional backroom political maneuvering.

Two days later, Ellington was at the front of similar protests that blocked off Downtown streets for nearly seven hours. A few days after that, she helped fill a Hamden Legislative Council budget meeting with people calling for an independent investigation of the shooting.

For every day in between those heavily reported protests, Ellington was in the streets for still more rallies and demonstrations: on Hillhouse Avenue, outside Hamden Town Hall, in the streets of Newhallville last Sunday in lieu of Easter church services.

And the work has already started paying off. After a week’s worth of heavy protests, the state police commissioner did something on Tuesday afternoon that, by his own admission, his department had never done before: he released Hamden Officer Devin Eaton’s body camera footage, as well as a trove of other surveillance videos, audio files, and transcriptions related to the officer-involved shooting, all well before the state’s attorney’s office completes its investigation of the officer-involved shooting.

Meanwhile, Hamden officials pledged to support calls for an independent investigation into the shooting and further-reaching structural changes in how it polices.

Ellington, a 32-year-old staff community organizer with New Haven Legal Assistance Association (NHLAA), has emerged as a central and strategic figure in New Haven’s police-accountability movement over nine years of tireless work.

NHLAA Staff Attorney James Bhandary-Alexander called her a role model.

“It’s her focus, her commitment to the principles that she holds, that draws everyone’s attention to what she’s doing and what she cares about,” Bhandary-Alexander said. ​“She holds herself accountable to the communities that she’s in relationship with, and she holds herself accountable to her principles in a way that’s extremely clear.”

Ellington is quick to say that these protests and the expedited responses from people in power are not the result of one person’s actions, though. She will also say that they are anything but spontaneous and random.

They are the manifestation of years’ worth of relationship-building and advocacy in the streets, courts, City Hall, and neighbors’ homes alongside victims of police violence.

And they are not about any one uniquely outrageous incident, but rather about facing off against an entire legal and political system that too often treats black and brown people as less than human. New Haven is used to political figures who publicly weigh in on controversies then negotiate for contracts, donations, or jobs behind the scenes. Ellington represents a different approach: Organizing at the grassroots around a set of clearly stated principles for social change, then pushing visibly and relentlessly over years for people in power to take specific public actions and enact specific policies.

“What we as a movement are trying to say is that every person who has an encounter with the police is innocent until proven guilty,” Ellington said in a recent interview with the Independent.

“And that the police should not be playing the role of judge, jury, and executioner in our communities. If mass shooters like the Parkland shooter, the Colorado movie theater shooter, can see the light of day in court, then why couldn’t Jayson Negron? Why couldn’t Zoe Dowdell? Why couldn’t Corbin Cooper? Why couldn’t Jarelle Gibbs? Why couldn’t Anthony Vega?”

The list goes on, she said, and is at least 20 names deep of Connecticut residents killed by police in the past three years.

Stephanie Washington and Paul Witherspoon didn’t die at police hands on April 16. But they did endure at least 16 rounds of fire from Hamden Officer Devein Eaton and Yale Officer Terrance Pollock. Now their names are added to the long list of those killed or injured by police in Connecticut that Ellington keeps on her computer and in the back of her mind, pushing her forward to the next rally, the next call for justice.

Joining The Fight

Born in Brooklyn and raised in the Bronx and in the upstate New York suburbs of Duchess County, Ellington moved to New Haven in 2004 to study at Quinnipiac University.

After graduating, she landed an Public Allies Connecticut — AmeriCorps placement with Teach Our Children, followed by another with Youth Rights Media.

She soon met Jewu Richardson, a fellow Public Allies Connecticut — AmeriCorps worker with Teach Our Children, and someone who would have a profound influence on the next decade of her life.

In early January 2010, she and Richardson met up to plan a community conversation with parents and students about school discipline policies in New Haven Public Schools. That meeting never happened. Because a few days later, on Jan. 16, Richardson was shot in the chest after a cross-town police chase. The police accused Richardson of using his car as a weapon to assault an officer. Richardson, and witnesses in the car with him, said he had had his hands up in compliance when Officer Ross Van Nostrand jumped on his windshield, broke the glass, shot him, and then beat him and arrested him.

“That’s when I got involved in the fight,” Ellington remembered. ​“This issue is not just a professional matter for me. This is very much a personal matter.”

She helped Richardson raise money to fight the felony assault charges, and helped get the word out there was another side to the story than the police narrative.

After Richardson’s case was dismissed due to mistrial, Ellington dove even deeper into the police accountability world.

Under the mentorship of Emma Jones, she got involved with People against Police Brutality’s calls for creating a Civilian Review Board (CRB) with teeth.

She helped turn out community members in droves to testify to alders about Richardson, Malik Jones, and other local cases of police violence that justified the creation of a CRB. In 2013, the organizing efforts worked. Voters overwhelming approved CRB language in the city charter referendum.

Ellington dedicated the next five years to making sure that the prospective police review body had teeth in the form of subpoena power. She showed up with allies again and again and again and again at City Hall to make sure that alders heard loud and clear that the community would only be satisfied with a CRB that could compel testimony from cops accused of wrongdoing.

She also landed the community organizing job with NHLAA, where she worked on turning out a broad coalition of people to pressure the Affordable Housing Task Force to recommend the passage of an inclusionary zoning ordinance and to pay attention to the voices of the homeless and to working class people of color.

Her patience paid off, yet again.

Earlier this year, alders passed a CRB ordinance while acknowledging that the newly formed body would have subpoena power per state law. And the Affordable Housing Task Force’s final report recommends the commission of a formal study of how to implement an inclusionary zoning policy that would require developers to set aside a certain percentage of apartments at affordable rents in new housing developments.

With those victories in hand, Ellington and her comrades in arms keep pushing. For the CRB to be truly representative of populations that suffer from police violence. For alders to prioritize affordable housing legislation targeted at helping the homeless and youth.

“Staying to midnight at some of these city hearings and just being present and on the ground has allowed us to build trust within our community,” Ellington said about what has worked in those past organizing efforts, and what is working so far in organizing in response to the April 16 police shooting of Stephanie Washington and Paul Witherspoon.

“It has a lot to do with relationships. With holding authentic space for the community to show up as itself, and to not pacify the community. I think a lot of people get turned away in moments like this because they have no trust in the community leadership because they feel they might have other interests. I think our interest is very clear. We want accountability. We want consequences, not just for these individual officers, but for the system. I think that’s a breath of fresh air for people. People are tired of being pacified to death. People are tired of being told to wait.”

“Anyone In Power Is Complicit”

Ellington first heard about the April 16 shooting a few hours after it happened at 4:32 a.m.

She got a call from a fellow activist who provides her with many of her tips. She heard from other people in the neighborhood that a woman had been shot by the police, and that she may have been shot in the face. (Police have confirmed that Washington was shot at least once in the torso. She may have also suffered injury to her face from the shattered glass from the car window.)

“The media reports came out late,” she said. ​“I questioned that. What was the lag? I didn’t hear the first kind of news reports until 9, and when I did read the reports, they said it was a ​‘non-life-threatening bullet wound.’”

She called that language dehumanizing, and unduly biased towards official and police accounts of what had happened, as opposed to what people in the neighborhood may have seen or heard.

“How is a bullet wound not life threatening?” she asked. ​“Just want to know. Does anyone want to take that risk? Not me.”

As the morning progressed, People against Police Brutality, Black Lives Matter New Haven, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, Justice for Jayson, and the Connecticut Bail Fund started putting together Facebook events and started spreading the word by phone, mouth, and email that they would be hosting protests outside the Hamden Police Headquarters and at the site of the shooting at Dixwell and Argyle later that day.

The point of those protests, she said, as with every other protest that has taken place since April 16, is to put as much community pressure as possible on local and state police, officials, and politicians as well as Yale administrators. The demands: immediately release body camera footage, publish the names of the officers involved, and then fire and arrest file charges against those officers for shooting at Washington and Witherspoon.

All the while, she said, the mission of groups like Police against Police Brutality, especially in the immediate aftermath of moments of crisis like last week’s shooting, is to demonstrate to as broad a public as possible that the problem is the system, not any one or two individual officers.

“Anyone in a position of power is complicit,” she said, ​“because police who shoot, kill, murder, chase, continue to be allowed to do so. Because there’s no consequences. There’s no punishment. That’s the larger problem here.”

Ellington is still pushing for Hamden to hire an independent investigator to look into the April 16 shooting and still ready to call for swift discipline for Hamden Officer Eaton and Yale Office Terrance Pollock. She is also pushing for a state law that recognizes police chases as the use of lethal force as well as for a statewide civilian review board.

The end goal for groups like hers is to fundamentally change ​“a system that fails in holding officers accountable for their violence,” she said. ​“A system that turns a blind eye on our communities, who are screaming and crying out for justice. You cannot hold a police officer accountable if there’s no formal accountability.”

Ellington was asked in an interview this week about why she thinks Officer Eaton started firing on Washington and Witherspoon.

She responded that it doesn’t matter.

“This is not about individual officers. The nature of policing is violent at its foundation, at its core,” she argued. ​“It’s almost irrelevant to me what is going through his mind.”

“Police violence is an epidemic,” she continued. ​“It’s not a question of good apples and bad apples. It’s about systemic state-sanctioned violence in our communities.”

Click on the Facebook Live videos below to watch parts of last Thursday’s protest, and to listen to Ellington interviewed along with Hamden City Council member Justin Farmer on WNHH’s ​“Dateline New Haven.”

Read previous stories about the April 16 shooting below.

• Detectives: Probable Cause For Assault Charge
• Hamden Cop Shoots Woman In Newhallville
• Cop Video Released; Hamden Never Told New Haven It Was Crossing The Border
• Protesters Storm PD Seeking Answers In Officer-Involved Shooting; Officials Mum
• Cop Who Shot Was Trained In New Haven
• Shot-At Man Plans To File Suit; Clerk Describes Original Complaint
• Outrage Over Shooting Shuts Down Streets
• Elicker: Remove Griffin From Shooting Probe
• Post-Shooting, Focus On Suburban Cops
• Griffin Obtains Search Warrant For Shot-Up Honda; Harp Stands By Griffin
• Top Yale Cops Seek To Rebuild Trust
• Public Seeks Independent Probe
• Farmer Backs Independent Investigation