Markeshia Ricks Photos
Formal downtown walk ends with man taken away on stretcher.
Lt. Mark O’Neil confiscates the man’s bottle of alcohol.
Downtown top cop Lt. Mark O’Neil tapped the man stretched out on the Green. The man barely moved at first, then muttered incomprehensibly.
“I just want to make sure you’re OK.” O’Neil said. “Can you stand for me?”
The man couldn’t stand because he was intoxicated.
That was the beginning of the end of a Downtown District “community walk” Wednesday where neighbors and police got to not only talk about community policing but see it in action.
Daniel Hunt leads Wednesday’s walk downtown…
… and bumps into his cousin along the way.
The walk was the latest in a series organized by community volunteer Daniel Hunt for New Haveners and police officers to get on neighborhood streets and engage people with the hope of strengthening police and community relations. Around a dozen cops and neighbors participated in the downtown walk Wednesday that started at the substation at 900 Chapel St.
Lt. David Zannelli flyers a car with tips to avoid break ins.
Lt. O’Neil reminded the walkers, who included some of his fellow district managers, that downtown isn’t a neighborhood in the traditional sense. Though increasingly people live in the city’s downtown, it’s also the commercial and transit epicenter of the city.
“We want more people to come downtown,” he said. “Our main goal is to stop the nonsense down here and bring more people into downtown — to make downtown and the city of New Haven thrive. This is your gateway into New Haven.”
Assistant Chief Racheal Cain stops to talk with Chapel Street vendors.
Assistant Police Chief Racheal Cain said although downtown isn’t a traditional neighborhood, the people they would meet would be typical of downtown’s daily inhabitants, namely workers, bus riders, and yes, people like the intoxicated man they ultimately encountered.
“I think it’s important to show them as well as the people in your normal neighborhood that the police and the community stand together and it is this type of relationship that is going to make the city better,” she said.
Project Longevity’s Brent Peterkin and Stacy Spell chat as they walk down Orange Street.
So they walked, stopping to chat up street vendors, shaking hands with people waiting at bus stops and flyering cars to let their owners know how to avoid break-ins, a crime of opportunity that is fairly common downtown, according to Lt. O’Neill.
O’Neill was going to flyer one car but noticed that the car had a parking ticket.
“He’s already having a bad day,” O’Neill said.
Hunt stops to say hello to a police officer stopped at the traffic light at Chapel and Temple streets.
Hunt bumped into people, including cops, he knew all throughout the tour. He said he’s met a lot of them on these walks.
“Each neighborhood that we do, I make it a habit of going up to people, going up to kids, going up to different people and telling them about this specific event and trying to engage as many people as we can,” he said. “Letting them know that we’re all out here together and that we’re on one accord.”
Hunt said he got the idea to start the walks after 14-year-old Tyrick “Reese” Keyes was killed last summer. Hunt, who works in student support services at the Engineering & Science University Magnet School (ESUMS), is no stranger to the impact gun violence has had on the city’s youth. His cousin, Marquell Banks, was shot and killed in 2011.
After Keyes was killed, Hunt said he contacted Police Chief Anthony Campbell and Assistant Chief Cain about doing the walks. A few months after the department had assigned new district managers, he began working with district managers to coordinate the walks. The first one was in Newhallville, then Hunt’s Hill South neighborhood, then Dwight/Kensington, Fair Haven, Dixwell, and now Downtown.
He said the next walk is planned for June 1 in the Whalley/Edgewood Avenue/Beaver Hills section of the city with WEB District Manager Lt. Elisa Tuozzoli, who participated in the Downtown walk Wednesday. Hunt said once the walks make their way to every section of the city, they’ll start over again.
“We’ll just keep rotating them,” he said.
Lt. O’Neil and two Downtown Ambassadors come upon a man napping on the Green.
When the walkers got to the Green Wednesday and came upon the intoxicated man most just hung back and observed, while O’Neill took the lead. The man became belligerent when O’Neill asked him if he had been drinking. But ultimately showed O’Neill his nearly empty bottle of booze.
O’Neill took the bottle and the man demanded it back.
“I can’t give it back,” he told the man. “It’s illegal.”
He once again asked if the man could stand. He acknowledged that he couldn’t.
“Would you like me to call you an ambulance?” O’Neill asked firmly but without raising his voice. After a few minutes of attempting to argue with O’Neill the man, who was already sporting an ID bracelet that appeared to have come from a medical facility, eventually acquiesced to the ambulance.